Your church already has a website: who will look after it in 5 years?

If your church already has a website, often built by a member or a volunteer, that is already very good news.

Someone gave time and skills so that your community could be visible online, share service times, activities, news or teachings.

And in many cases, the result is genuinely successful.

But one question is asked far too rarely when a site is created:

Who will still look after it in 3, 5 or 10 years?

When the volunteer webmaster is no longer there

In a church, the website is often created by the person most comfortable with the web.

They know WordPress, Wix or another tool. They buy the domain name, configure the site, build the pages, then perhaps show a few people how to publish a news item.

For a while, everything is fine.

Then the situation changes.

That person moves away, changes church, has less time, or simply wants to serve elsewhere.

The site does not stop overnight.

That is precisely what makes the problem hard to see.

Leaders can still sometimes publish a news item or edit a text. The site therefore still appears to exist, while nobody really owns the technical responsibility any more.

A website is more than publishing news

Adding a news item or changing Sunday service times is one thing.

Maintaining a website properly over time is another.

Depending on the tool, you may need to look after:

• CMS updates ;
• plugins and the theme ;
• hosting ;
• the domain name and its renewal ;
• the HTTPS certificate ;
• backups ;
• security ;
• performance ;
• occasional technical errors ;
• changing web best practices.

WordPress, for example, can work very well for a church when it is properly configured and maintained.

So WordPress itself is not the problem.

The real question is rather: who is responsible for this technical maintenance in your church, and will that person still be there in several years?

Hosted platforms such as Wix already take on a large part of that technical maintenance. Even so, managing the site, its structure, its search visibility and its long-term future remains important.

A site can stay online… and quietly degrade

A poorly maintained website does not necessarily break overnight.

It can age gradually.

A plugin is no longer maintained. A feature starts to fail on mobile. Some pages become slow. The design no longer evolves. Nobody dares to touch certain parts of the site for fear of breaking something.

Then comes the moment when an update becomes difficult, or an important feature stops working.

You then have to find someone able to understand a site built several years earlier, sometimes with tools or plugins that are no longer used.

In the worst case, the church ends up having to rebuild a large part of the site.

A site can look good and still rank poorly

There is also another, much less visible issue: search engine optimisation.

A site can be pleasant to look at and perfectly functional, while still containing many SEO mistakes.

Web professionals see this regularly, including on sites that have nothing to do with churches.

For example, a page may have an address such as:

church.org/page?id=128

whereas a URL such as:

church.org/our-teachings

is much clearer for visitors and for search engines.

Other problems are also common:

• page titles filled in poorly ;
• incorrect use of H1, H2 and H3 headings ;
• unnecessarily heavy images ;
• missing or unhelpful alternative texts ;
• important pages that are hard to find ;
• weak internal linking between pages ;
• missing or poorly configured SEO tags ;
• old pages deleted without a redirect.

These mistakes do not mean the site was badly made.

They simply show that creating a website and working professionally on its search visibility are two different skills.

A poorly prepared redesign can wipe out years of SEO

The issue becomes even more important when a church decides to rebuild its site.

Imagine a teachings page that has existed for several years at this address:

church.org/sermons

Google knows this page. It may appear in search results, and other sites may have linked to it over the years.

During the redesign, a new page is created:

church.org/our-messages

The old page is deleted, without a redirect to the new one.

For a visitor, the change may seem minor.

For a search engine, these are still two different addresses.

Part of the history and value built up by the old page then risks being lost.

That is one of the reasons why migrating or redesigning an existing site needs to be prepared carefully.

The point is not to do without a skilled volunteer

The problem is not, in the end, that a volunteer creates the church website.

On the contrary: many churches have an online presence today precisely because someone agreed to put their skills at their service.

The risk appears when the technical running of the site depends lastingly on that one person.

A church should ideally still be able to publish its content when people change.

The communications lead can change.

The pastor can change.

The volunteer who built the site can leave.

The site itself should still be able to keep working.

Separating content management from technical responsibility

This is notably the distinction on which Ekklesi was designed.

The church remains responsible for what it knows best: its content.

It can publish news, announcements, teachings and other information without needing to understand how the site works technically.

For its part, Ekklesi takes care of the technical platform and its evolution: hosting, maintenance, backups and the practices needed for sites to keep working.

The aim is simple: to avoid a church needing its own webmaster in order to keep a quality website over time.

This approach also makes it possible to evolve the platform for all the churches that use it, rather than leaving each community to maintain its own installation for years.

You already have a site: that work is not lost

Changing solution should not mean starting blindly from scratch.

When a site already exists, you notably need to identify:

• the important pages ;
• the content to keep ;
• the URLs already known to Google ;
• the pages that generate traffic ;
• existing external links ;
• the redirects to put in place.

The aim of a well-prepared migration is to preserve as much as possible of the work already done and the history the site has earned.

Before rebuilding a church website, it is therefore important to think not only about how it looks, but also about what already exists.

Thinking about the church website for the long term

Creating a website is relatively accessible today.

The real challenge is to have a site that stays fast, secure, properly indexed and easy to manage several years after it was created.

Before choosing a solution, a simple question can therefore be useful:

“If the person creating our site today is no longer available tomorrow, what happens?”

If the answer is “we don’t really know”, it may be worth thinking now about the site’s long-term future.

Ekklesi was designed precisely so that churches can have a website without becoming responsible for all of its technical infrastructure themselves.

To explore this approach, see our page on creating a church website.