Are you a church leader researching how to build a church website? An engaging church website is an essential tool for keeping your community informed while also introducing your ministry to visitors. Thankfully, creating a church website has never been easier! The best church website builders are powerful, easy to use, and built with churches in mind. 

Here are the most important features to look for in a church website builder:

Easy to create and update

Many churches rely on volunteers or staff members with limited web experience to create and manage their websites, while others hire expensive agencies to do the work for them. In either scenario, churches are often faced with excessive costs (time or monetary) when it comes to making even the smallest changes to their websites. The best church website builders, however, make it easy to create and update your content.

Here are some handy features that you should look for in your church’s website builder:

  • Drag-and-drop builder: A drag-and-drop builder is key to efficiently building and editing your website. It can make web development so intuitive that anyone can build a beautiful church website in a matter of minutes. 
  • Custom code: While you shouldn’t have to know code to build a website for your church (thanks to your drag-and-drop builder!), the best church website builders give you the option to utilize code for further customization.
  • Church-themed website templates: Most popular website builders are not made with churches in mind. Subsplash stands out among website builders by offering dozens of church-specific templates to utilize on your website. These pre-built templates enable you to create a beautiful, powerful website in just a few clicks. Templates are the perfect starting point for building your church website, allowing you to customize it with your church brand and content.

Online giving integrations

Donations play a crucial part in the work of your ministry. Finding a website solution that lets you incorporate your digital church giving provider is a great way to encourage generosity by making it incredibly accessible for your community to give regardless of their location.

Most giving solutions provide an embed code, which is a block of HTML code that is unique to your church. The best website builders for churches make it easy to use this code to add giving directly to your custom church website. Additionally, placing giving in your navigation bar makes your giving page easy to find for visitors.

Want to see an online giving integration in action? Head to the Interbay Community Church site to check out a giving webpage that was built in just a matter of minutes with Subsplash!

Media delivery 

Time and time again, your ministry prepares and presents meaningful gospel-centered content to your community. Being able to share that content on your website is a great way for your community to revisit or engage with it for the first time.

The best website builders for churches offer a robust media delivery system that makes it easy to host, play, and share video and audio content right on your website. Additionally, live streaming your services is crucial, as many churchgoers opt for a hybrid experience. These tools are ideal for adding a sermon series, podcast, and any other media to your website.

Here’s a concrete example: Let’s say you want to have a page on your website that always displays a video recording of your most recent sermon. Your website builder and its media delivery system should make it easy to:

  • Create a new page that’s easy to add and find in the website navigation bar.
  • Have a video player embedded that automatically updates every week once the latest sermon video has been uploaded.

The Subsplash Platform allows you to manage all of your content from within the Subsplash Dashboard and watch it populate on your custom mobile app, TV app, and website, with no extra work.

Already a Subsplash client? Log in to create a media library embed today.

Want to see media embeds in action? Visit the Interbay Community Church site.

Fully responsive 

It’s essential to consider the user experience when building a website, and a significant portion of those visiting your church website will be doing so on their mobile devices. Finding a mobile-friendly website builder is key to creating a delightful viewing experience. 

The best church website builders are fully responsive, meaning your website should automatically scale and adjust based on the screen of the device being used. Website solutions from Subsplash offer even more control by giving you the ability to customize the content you want to appear on desktop and mobile versions of your website, such as choosing to hide media that would not look ideal when viewed on a mobile device.

Secure and backed up

The best website builders offer secure and backed up storage of your content. Ideally, this would include images, text, video, and more. Certain website builders even allow you to access previous versions of pages and restore them to use and build upon again.

Storage space is a necessity, especially for churches that plan on uploading lots of media. Low-cost website builders like Wix and WordPress may not offer as much storage space as you need, and it’s important to account for that when choosing the right website builder for churches. Churches using Subsplash as their church website builder can store as many media assets as needed that they’re actively using on their website. No need to worry about space!

Dedicated support

While most website solutions provide some kind of support, the quality differs greatly. Basic solutions like Wix, WordPress, and Squarespace offer support via chat and written articles (which are often out of date), but in order to have access to dedicated support you have to pay for a premium package. Similarly, being reliant on a web designer often includes paying them an hourly rate on top of the amount you already paid them to build out your church website.

Relying on slow-to-respond chat windows or sifting through articles by yourself can make troubleshooting difficult. The best church website builders, like Subsplash, include those as resources while also offering access to dedicated support and customer success experts.

Blogging functionality

The best website builders for churches have a built-in blogging tool. Blogging functionality is the easiest way to share announcements, updates, events, and even your Sunday bulletin in one organized place on your church website, leading to more consistent engagement.

Church website builders like Subsplash take it a step further by offering additional features integrated right into the blogging tool, such as commenting, index page layouts, and more.

Forms

Having a go-to place on your church website for gathering information and connecting with your visitors is important. The best church website builders, like Subsplash, include this through an easy-to-use form builder. Many popular website builders, like WordPress, do not include this as a native feature.

Forms are a great addition to your church website! Everything from prayer requests, signing up for a small group, filling out a connect card, and more can be done through a form. The best church websites incorporate forms in order to better build and cultivate your community.

Want to see Subsplash contact forms in use? Check it out on the Interbay Community Church website.

Affordable

While there are plenty of free website builders out there, those offer very bare-bones functionality and often result in you having to pay to unlock additional features that should already be included.  

Hiring an independent web designer might also seem enticing, but in reality it’s an expensive and ongoing process. An average web designer could charge you over $5,000 and monthly maintenance fees of $50 or more. Plus, any one-off requests to your website would cost an additional fee with steep hourly rates.  

The best option for you is using a dedicated website builder through the Subsplash Platform that is made with churches in mind and automatically includes key features like access to support and customer success experts, secure and plentiful storage, a robust media delivery system, an online giving integration, all while being fully integrated with the rest of the Subsplash Platform!

Subsplash: The best website builder for churches

Churches and ministries of all sizes and technical abilities benefit from having a website. The best website builders are simple to use and powerful, making it easy for your church to increase engagement, expand your reach, and make more disciples.

Ready to learn how your organization can better engage your audience with the best website builder for churches? 

Learn more about how to build a website on the Subsplash Platform: [.blog-contact-cta]Let’s chat[.blog-contact-cta]!

Already using the Subsplash Platform? Log in to your Subsplash Dashboard to schedule a call with your Client Success Manager!

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