How to Prevent Your Church Website from Failing After Launch

We’re wrapping up this series in which we’re sharing with you our proprietary church website design process.

In fact, after sharing Step 9: Everything you need to know to ensure a successful launch of your new church website in our last post, you may have assumed the series was over.

Once a church website has launched isn’t it finished?

That depends…

• Do you want it to continue to function well?
• Do you want your search rankings to improve?
• Do you want people to come back to your website regularly?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then there’s one more step.

10) Create a Website Maintenance Plan

There are 3 categories of updates to include in your plan:

1. Software Updates.

If you (or your developer) builds your website using WordPress, the WordPress core, plugins and theme all need to be updated regularly. If this isn’t done, your website could get hacked.

Usually, it’s fairly easy to check for updates and make updates to the WordPress core and plugins. Login to the WordPress admin, and look in the top left corner for “Updates.” If there are updates available, you can usually install them with 2 clicks. We recommend doing this once a week.

Unfortunately, the “Updates” feature of the WordPress admin usually won’t tell you if your theme has an update, and it definitely won’t tell you if a plugin has been abandoned by its developer. Therefore, we recommend setting a quarterly calendar reminder to review your plugins and theme.

By the way, if you go with OurChurch.Com’s church website design service or build your website with our WP-EZ church website builder, we take care of all of these updates for you.

2. Content Updates

Some content like news and calendars need to be updated regularly. How often depends on the type of content, but we recommend most churches update their content once a week.

Other content may change infrequently, but should be reviewed quarterly or at least annually to make sure its still accurate. This includes content like your staff page, the list of active ministries, active small groups and bible studies.

3. Content Additions

If you want to improve your search rankings and keep visitors coming back to your website, one of the best ways to accomplish this is by regularly publishing valuable content to your website. The most common types of church website content are sermons (audio, video, notes or transcripts), newsletters, and blog posts. Sermons and newsletters are usually published weekly. Blog posts can be published weekly or even 2 or 3 times a week.

Consistency is extremely important when it comes to publishing content. Therefore, it’s important to create a content plan/schedule that is sustainable.

If content additions like sermons and blog posts are something you’d like help with, those are options with our church SEO service.

If it’s not on your calendar, it doesn’t exist, and it’s not going to get done. –Paul Steinbrueck

Comment and Discuss:

• What does your website maintenance plan look like?

If you’d like to discuss a new church website with one of our experts, complete the form below (mobile) or to the right (desktop).