– Today on Pro Church Daily we’re talking about five easily forgotten elements that every church website needs. – Well, hey there and welcome to Pro Church Daily, the show where, in 10 minutes or less, you’ll get your daily dose of tips and tactics to help your church share the message of Jesus, while we navigate the biggest communication shift we’ve seen in the last 500 years. I’m your host Alex Mills, I’m joined as always by the boss man, it’s Brady Shearer. And today we’re gonna talk about five easily forgotten elements that every church website needs. – You’re putting together your church’s website, there’s the things that come to mind that you’re not gonna forget.
And then there are some of the other things that, based on my analysis of church websites, and I spend a lotta time looking at websites, they’re easily forgotten. And you’re not necessarily purposefully forgetting these, but in the process of putting together a full website, it’s easy to just overlook certain things that are actually very, very important. So, let’s talk about five of those easily forgotten elements.
The first is a Search bar. There was an Eye-tracking study done by Missouri S&T and it found that users were spending about six seconds of their attention, on average, on a website’s search bar.
Just shows you that the attention of Search bars is high. Why is that? Well, what makes Search bars so important on your website is that it puts the control back in your user’s lap, where basically it’s saying, here’s how we’ve designed our website, and here’s how we’ve developed our website, and we think this is, at least, in our mind, the easiest and best way for you to find the information you need and take the next step of action that you’re looking for.
But with that being aside, you can also use the Search bar and just directly dive into what you think you’re looking for. And we do this with Google, right?
The internet is basically a giant example of your website, where basically, we could go directly to URLs, but it’s so much easier sometimes to use Search, and so we integrated a Search bar into every single Nucleus, it’s in the Main Nav Menu, it’s super easy to find, and the reason for that is because it is widely used by visitors and it needs to have a prominent location on your homepage. – Nice. – Second easily forgotten element, and this one is surprising, new visitor information. – Yeah. – We did a case study of more than a thousand church websites, if you wanna see that full case study, you can go to blog dot nucleus dot church, we found that 61.7% of church websites that we analyzed did not have readily available new visitor information.
We talked about this on Episode Number 51 and 50, 51 and 52 of Pro Church Daily, just the importance of having new visitor information really high up in your website. Really spending your whole main headline addressing a new visitor. What we found when we were looking at so many churches’ websites is that we would scroll down and maybe they would have something linked in the footer, maybe they’d have a small link, but most often, more often than not, there was pretty much nothing that was targeted at new visitors on these churches’ homepages. So I would land on the website, and I’ve never visited this church before, and so basically I’m seeing it through the eyes of a potential new visitor, and the first thing I see is usually a slider, (Alex laughs) and it’s like, Men’s Retreat, Potluck Dinner.
– Yeah. – And it’s like I’m looking at all this information and I’m like, “If I’m a new visitor, “I feel like an outsider.” And I don’t want to feel like an outsider.
First impressions are being made on your church’s website, you need to address potential new visitors. Prominent location.
On Nucleus, we always recommend our users dedicate their featured card, the main card at the top of their site, for the I’m New or the Plan a Visit section of your website, so that the very first thing someone sees as a new visitor is for them. And everyone else in your church, all they need to do is swipe that first card away or scroll a tiny bit and then everything else is for them, right? The majority of your homepage is probably still gonna be for existing members of your congregation.
So dedicate that first part to new visitors. – I think one of the reasons this element gets overlooked a lotta times is because a lotta the pressure to build a church website comes from your pastor or comes from a department head.
It’s like, “I need my Men’s Retreat information “front and center.” – I need my Sermon Series. – Right! – And that’s really not the main objective of your church’s website and I think websites have been marketed to churches, misrepresented and mismarketed to churches, saying hey, build this website to impress your pastor, impress your congregation.
No, that’s actually not the primary goal of what your church website should be or who it’s for, but it’s actually for first-time visitors.
So if we could just maintain that perspective, then we’d end up putting a higher priority on these things that are getting overlooked. – Third easily forgotten element on a church’s website, service times and address. Really, this is the thing that you want to put and plaster on every single page of your website.
So we recommend churches put this in the byline on their Nucleus, so you have that big main headline, A Safe Place to Explore Your Faith, and then right in that sub-headline, the byline basically, Service Times every Sunday at 9:00 a.m., so it’s right there. But then also, we put it in the footer on every single Nucleus, so that on every single page, there is service times, so that it’s unmissable, if you scroll to the bottom, every single page has it. – Yep. – Number four, similar to service times, this is all your contact information, so this would be address, phone number, email. Again, we stick this all into the footer so that it’s available on every single page, so that Google is pulling it into the Google My Business listing.
If you haven’t filled that out properly, it’s still going to be there in search, indexed, either way. Here’s something interesting, 51% of people think that thorough contact information is the most important element missing from many company websites. So you don’t wanna be one of those companies, one of those churches that neglects this such important information. Put it in your footer so that it’s on every single page of the site. – Right.
– Put it on your homepage. Put it in your Plan a Visit page, the I’m New page, make it easily available.
Finally, the fifth most easily forgotten element of church websites is social links. That same Eye-tracking study by Missouri S&T found that participants spent, on average, about 5.95 seconds focused on the social links of the websites they were asked to browse.
I don’t know if this is a common behavior, but I often find myself going to companies, organizations that I like online, going to their website, scrolling to their footer or their nav menu where I just assume their social links are, and then following them directly from there. So if I want to follow a company on Facebook or on Instagram, I’ll usually just go to their website and assume that it’s linked somewhere there, and a lot of the times, I find that it’s not and it’s always frustrating. I’m like, “Well now I gotta track down “this social thing somewhere else.” – Mm-hmm. It’s frustrating.
And also, a great thing, putting your social links in your website, it allows for cross-promotion.
– Absolutely. – Just free promotion, someone scrolling there and they’re like, “Man, I wanna connect to this church elsewhere.” Easily, we put it in the footer on every Nucleus so on every single page, again, those social links are there. – Awesome.
– And one thing that’s kind of come up a bunch of times in this episode is just how much that we put in the footer.
– Yeah. – It’s really easy to overlook your church website’s footer. It’s like, “Oh boring” I used to put nothing in footers basically. We started working with these new designers and they were making these really big footers, – Huge.
– and putting so much in there, and I was like, “It’s really just a great catch-all.” Like it works for Search, makes sure that all that less glamorous information that maybe you don’t winna prioritize, but you need to have, you put it in the footer.
And so we’ve taken that design that we’ve done on Story tape and Nucleus, and we’ve put it into the Nucleus design for every church that uses Nucleus, and I think it’s just a much better solution. – Yeah, and it’s an easy way to accomplish a lotta things at once. – Sure.
– And not have to worry about, “Okay, where am I going to put service times on this page? “Where am I going to put our address on this page? “How am I going to creatively work it in “so that it’s contextual on this page?” Just throw it in the footer and it’s on every page. – Exactly.
– It’s great. – This information on this episode of Pro Church Daily was pulled from an article on the Nucleus blog called The Eleven Part Church Homepage Formula. Basically, there are 11 parts to your church’s homepage that need to be there.
We call it a formula because it’s super easy to follow, and we documented each of those 11 parts, in that article, blog dot nucleus dot church is the place to find that, again, The Eleven Part Church Website Homepage Formula. Thanks for watching today’s episode of Pro Church Daily.
We’ll see you tomorrow. Hey thanks for watching today’s episode of Pro Church Daily, if you haven’t already, subscribe to this channel and enable notifications so you never miss another video. – And if you like this video, it’d mean the world to us if you’d give it a thumbs up. – A big old thumbs up! Thanks for watching, we’ll see you tomorrow.
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