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How Google will bury your church website

YourChurchWebsiteOn April 21st, a new update from Google will bury your church website from MOBILE search listings if your website isn’t ready for their new requirements.

It won’t matter if you’ve had your domain since the beginning of the Internet age and had a church teenager put a basic website together with iFrames.

If your church website is not up to Google’s new mobile-friendly requirements, they will bury it when a user is looking for a church via a mobile device.

Your potential church visitors will not find your website (nor see these 2 important web pages).

Your potential new members will not locate your church under Churches in your town.

But you can fix your church website so that visitors can find your church from their mobile devices and computers.

Is Your Church Website Mobile Friendly?

This is the criteria that will affect your church website rankings:

Is your church website friendly to mobile devices?

Can a person use your church website without having to zoom in to tap a link, read the text, or accomplish other simple tasks?

My friend Paul Steinbrueck , using the term Mobilegeddon, writes

Google will start factoring mobile-friendliness into its search ranking algorithm on April 21. Google itself has called the update “significant,” bigger than the Panda or Penguin updates.

Websites that are not mobile friendly will be penalized.

Google will not drop your church website from it’s search engine.

You won’t see your website deleted from their searches.

But it will be booted further and further down in the rankings.

Being mobile friendly is one of over 200 signals that Google will use to determine where your website will appear in it’s listing.

Google decides what mobile friendly looks like.  If Google’s automated bots think your website is not mobile friendly, your website will be penalized.

In the past, mobile friendliness was a minor criteria.

Now, it is a “significant one.”

Can my church website be fixed?

Paul goes on to write:

If you have not started working to make your website mobile-friendly by now, it’s unlikely you will get it done by April 21.

But all hope is not lost. Unlike other penalties that took weeks to resolve and remove, Google says the mobile-friendly factor is updated in real-time.

That means as soon as your website is mobile-friendly your mobile search rankings will improve.

You may not get it done before April 21, but the sooner you start, the sooner you will recover.

Even in recent weeks, I’ve seen church websites that are not mobile friendly.

The church I visited on Easter Sunday in 2015 is horribly useless and looks like something designed in the early 1990s with frames and awful colors.

Depending on the complexity of your website, the fix may take some time.

Option 1: Talk with an Church Website Expert

If you are HTML dependent for every page, you’ll need to work at making the coding changes necessary to make your website mobile friendly.  That is beyond what I can write here.   In fact, Paul gives you an invitation to talk with someone on his team:

If your website still is not mobile-friendly, don’t freak out. But don’t curl up into a ball or put your head in the sand either. Move forward. Decide as soon as possible whether you’re going to make your current website mobile-friendly or get a new website. Decide as soon as possible who is going do the work.

If you’re not sure about these decisions and would like to talk them through, schedule a free call with one of our experts.

Tell Paul’s team I sent you.

I’ve known Paul for several years from OurChurch.Com.  You can find him on

I’ve done a webinar with Paul, plus an interview on Church Websites (though recorded in 2009, it still has some good conversation starters)

Option 2: If you use a CMS, change your Church Website theme.

If you use a CMS like WordPress or Joomla on a self-hosted domain, you can search for a mobile friendly theme.

I personally use professional themes for WordPress from the Genesis Framework by StudioPress.  All of their themes are mobile friendly.   I have personally found that using WordPress to manage the content on my site to be the way to go.

A theme change (or new setup) for your mobile friendly website is not that hard.

You can change a theme in less than 2 minutes after you find the one you want.

Most of the work will be involved in making sure that all your content and sidebars reappear in the new themes.

I have had to change a few WordPress themes on some of my other website to make them mobile friendly.  It took me a few hours to make sure everything transferred into the new theme that I bought from Genesis.

Option 3: Use a Church Website service that does it all for you.

Here is one solution to turn your clumsy embarrassing church website into a awesome front porch for your visitors to come and see you before coming to see you.

Sure, you could do it free in WordPress or Joomla, but has anyone fixed your church website site in 10 years?

Clover Website is one solution to a church website that works.

I subscribe to a email list of church administrators and this one has been highly recommended in that list.  You can read those recommendations here.

We just switched to Clover Church Websites Sites last month. Our Youth Pastor maintains it and loves it. They even have a live person that answers the phone if there are any questions!

Definite limitations due to the fact that they’ve designed it for easy use by non-web designers but the benefits, in my opinion, far outweigh the limitations. We haven’t been backed into a corner by any of the limitations.  Most have an easy work around.

Your church website should not embarrass you.

Look into Clover for your church website.  This is an affiliate link which will benefit our ministry work in Latin America.

Read here if you need to convince your leaders about getting a church website.

Note: Links to Ourchurch.com, Studiopress, and Clover.com are affiliate links.  Any purchases made through those links will benefit our ministry in Latin America.

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Is your church website an open door or barrier to your church?

Today, Yvon Prehn allow me to share her guest post about your church website.

Yvon is an excellent writer and shares frequently on church communications – in fact, that is her ministry.

I’ve benefited much from my conversations with her and her regular newsletter provides all sorts of great snippets.  She also runs a membership site that is extremely affordable for churches and ministries.

Guest Post: Is Your Church Website an Open Door or Barrier?

Today, if we have a question about anything, where do we look up information?

If we want hours of operation, products offered, staff bios?

If we want to know what movie is playing, what time a concert starts, what classes are offered at a college where do we do to find out?

Obviously, we go to the website.

It’s the same whether we are looking up information about what computer to buy or what church to attend.

We judge the organization, its people, and its products based on the website.

If the website gives us winter hours and it is spring; if the sale has been over for weeks or if the hours of operation are incorrect, we aren’t likely to visit the business or have confidence in it.

If the business is a franchise and the website is an obvious template, with little local personalization, we won’t think much about the technical skills (equated with competence overall) of the staff.

Again, we judge a church the same way.

Unfortunately many church websites don’t meet the minimal standards.

Though lost customers may be bad for a business, the consequences for a church are much more serious. Following is an example of what can happen and then some suggestions for change.

Read more:

Excellent Church Website Tips

The article goes on to give excellent tips to keeping up your church website.

  • Keep it current.
  • Learn how to create one in wordpress

In my experience, I still see a lot of churches that make dumb mistakes on their website – stuff that should easily be fixed:

Help your church visitors find you this coming Easter

Easter is right around the corner.

Does your church website reflect your Easter services?

Does it promote the post Easter sermon series to help your visitors decide to return?

This Easter, some people might want to visit your church.

This Holy Week, some out of town guests may want to visit your special services for holy week.

You don’t know who they are.

They don’t know where they want to go.

God has given these first time church visitors spiritual thirst that propels them to seek a church.

So what do they do?

They likely search the internet first to find a church website.

Read more:

Coaching Corner:

Take a good look at your church website.

Would a potential Easter visitor find the basic information needed to attend your services?

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3 Keys to Make an Evangelistic Sunday School Culture

Sunday school has a long history of being an evangelistic tool of the church.

I’ve visited growing churches that utilize their Sunday School to not only grow their members, but create a space where newcomers can connect and discover faith.

Recently, a small church pastor asked me about how to make their Sunday School evangelistic.

They are a small church in a semi-rural and under-resourced community.  I get the sense from the pastor that members have an apathy about Sunday School that may be hard to over come. [Read more…] about 3 Keys to Make an Evangelistic Sunday School Culture

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1 Way To Keep a Person from Visiting Your Church

Church Website Failure that will keep a potential visitor from ever coming to your church

We were a family who was ready to visit a church.

For a Christmas break, our small new church development decided to take two weeks off.  Many of our leaders needed time to travel and visit with family.

We got to visit another church for the first time, giving us fresh insights to help improve your hospitality this year.

We did not visit this one because of a really bad mistake on their church website [Read more…] about 1 Way To Keep a Person from Visiting Your Church

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How @BrandonACox is Planting a Church Using Social Media

What if you are a brand new church with a near zero marketing budget?  That is how Brandon A Cox started planting Grace Hills Church in Bentonville Arkansas.  Read below as he shares some of what he is doing in social media to get visitors to come to his church.

Using Social Media to Market a Church

This snippet on planting a church using social media comes from Paul Stienbruck’s article at the Ourchurch.Com Blog

Planting a Church Using Social Media

In a recent blog post, Brandon wrote:

    • We started with two couples (including the Cox’s). We spent $0 on traditional advertising but had 35 at our first gathering in July of 2011.
    • We grew to approximately 80 within six months by word-of-mouth and while spending $0 on traditional advertising.
    • We launched with 176 on our first Sunday, mostly gathered through Facebook, word-of-mouth, and search engines.

Sounds like a pretty good start.

So how did they do it?

Brandon included some great tips!

1) Start with a website

“It’s a content hub, of sorts. Sometimes your goal is to move people from social platforms to your site. Sometimes it’s the opposite. And sometimes they simply co-exist for different purposes, but having a hub on the web is essential.”

2) Use Facebook Pages Well

A few key tips:

    • Understand the difference between a profile (which is for people) and a page (which is for brands, organizations, celebrities, etc.).
    • Use your personal Facebook profile to connect with new people in your community, people who get in touch about your plant, etc.
    • Write often. At least daily.
    • Converse. Answer messages, reply to comments, and be helpful to those with questions.

3) Provide Easily Sharable Content

“You are a content-producing master! … We take our messages and break them into bite-sized pieces and share them as a daily devotional on both our website and our Facebook page… All of the content a church produces can be distributed to the volunteer army of people in the pews to equip them to share their faith, their church, and their story.”

You should really read on for their 5 things they are not doing.

– See more at the original post here.

How do you use social media to market your church?

He’s learned some great lessons.

If you are using social media in your church plant, what is a tip that you want to share?  Add it to the comments below.

Then share this post with a tweet or plus one, inviting others to share their tips as well.

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Personal Invitations to Church are not Enough

As much as I believe in giving personal invitations to church, I can’t say that I personally know that many people who sit at home just hoping someone would invite them to church.

Statistics show that some people will respond to an invitation to church,  and that such invitations are often part of the conversion process.

But in our busy culture, it might take months of repeated invitations before a person accepts and attends.

Why is that? [Read more…] about Personal Invitations to Church are not Enough

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