10 Great Church WordPress Website Examples (And What Makes Them Special)

Church websites are everywhere because every church has one (as they should)! However, once you start looking at church websites of other churches, you start to realize that there are many different ways to build them and different software that you can use to design and develop the website. Even though church websites may look similar (or even vastly different), there are a lot of similarities when you boil everything down. Once you start to figure out the similarities, you might start asking, “What makes these websites different?” In this article, we will talk about 10 great church websites, how they handle two key elements for your church (events and sermon media), and what makes them different.

If you’re reading this, I’m assuming that you’re either looking for inspiration to build a new website or you are looking to find someone to build you a new church website. If you are looking for a designer and developer that specializes in church websites, you have come to the right place. Click the button below to jump to the contact form to get in touch with me today.

1. Shandon Baptist Church

CMS: Custom WordPress Church Website

Sermon Media Management: Direct YouTube gallery embed to the website so that anytime the church finished a livestream, the service is automatically added to the website’s gallery, including the series graphic. This speeds up the media teams workflow and ensures that the website is always up to date.

Event Management: Their Church Management Software allows for a filterable embed of their church’s calendar. This way, they can feature each ministry’s calendar on the appropriate page and showcase the specific events they want featured on the upcoming events page.

What makes this website special: Shandon Baptist Church needed to have special logins for various components of their website. This way, different parts of the website can be managed by different staff, without giving the rest of the staff access to the website, ensuring both privacy and security for the website.

2. The Church at LifePark

CMS: Custom WordPress Church Website

Sermon Media Management: Series Engine plugin that powers their sermon archive, but they are still using third-party podcasting software called Podbean for their sermon audio, which is embedded onto the website.

Event Management: The event calendar on the website is separate from their church management software so that the church has full control over what events are on the website and what events are not on the website. Now, they use their management software for managing the calendar between staff members, but the member facing calendar is powered by the website.

What makes this website special: This website contains a prayer wall so that folks can leave prayer requests right on the website. The prayer requests go to the prayer coordinator and live on the website. As a part of the prayer wall, we built out a custom screen so that the church can display prayer requests on the TVs in the church lobby, all connected to the prayer wall on the website.

3. Marquette Manor Baptist Church

CMS: Custom WordPress Website

Sermon Media Manager: Completely custom-built back-end so that sermons can be filtered with as many filters as they’d like. The audio podcast is also powered by this custom-built sermon media platform.

Event Management: Custom-built event portal that is integrated into the website. This event calendar is powered by the same software used to build out the backend of the sermon media manager, meaning one less plugin/software on the website. Plus, there are fewer options inside of the calendar so that the church staff can quickly and efficiently add events to the website.

What makes this website special: Marquette does not use any Church Management Software, so they need the website to handle signups and registrations for their events. We also created a church member portal on the website that requires church members to request login access. Once they are approved by the church’s admin, they are able to log into the website and view the church bulletins, financial reports, prayer requests, and church membership directory.

4. Taylors First Baptist Church

CMS: Custom WordPress Website

Sermon Media Manager: We utilized the Series Engine plugin that powers their sermon archive, but they are still using the third-party podcast softcared, SoundCloud, for their sermon audio.

Event Management: We connected the website to Taylor’s Church Management Software so that all events and registrations are connected directly to their software. We used Display.Church and displayed events on each ministry page and master calendar pages.

What makes this website special: Taylors virtually took three separate websites and put them into one large website – the church, their recreation center, and their preschool. The goal was to create a website that, although complicated with nearly a hundred website pages before we rebuilt it, is simple to use and navigate. Taylors also has multiple podcasts and needed a place to store, share, and promote all of their podcasts. Taylors also has an active recreation center that needs to showcase class schedules, membership prices, and links to register.

5. First Baptist Church Richardson

CMS: Custom WordPress Website

Sermon Media Manager: FBCR has a three-fold sermon media library, all powered by the website: YouTube embeds for their livestream, YouTube gallery for their past services, and sermon media podcast player.

Event Management: FBCR is a very active church with many events happening at the church. To keep the master staff calendar separate from the website, we created a custom events calendar on the website that allows FBCR to quickly input events, choose where they will automatically appear on the website, and link out to registrations.

What makes this website special: FBCR focuses heavily on community involvement and community partnerships. The church needed a way to input events and serving opportunities into the website and have them appear in various places on the website. We built out an “opportunities” portal on the backend of the website that allows the admin team to add events/opportunities, select their type, and select where they should appear on the website.

6. Parkway Christian Center

CMS: Custom WordPress Website

Sermon Media Manager: We utilized the Series Engine plugin to power their sermon archive and podcast feed, saving them money because they aren’t paying for another hosting platform.

Event Management: We connected the website to their Church Management Software so that all events and registrations are connected directly to their software. We used Display.Church and displayed events on each ministry page and master calendar pages.

What makes this website special: The goal was to keep the website as streamlined as possible. Therefore, we used photos in section backgrounds and accordions for information throughout the website.

7. First Baptist Church Mishawaka

CMS: Custom WordPress Website

Sermon Media Manager: Sermon media page powered by a direct YouTube gallery embed, similar to Shandon Baptist Church.

Event Management: FBC Mishawaka does many events inside each ministry, but they didn’t want to keep the website updated month to month. So, we created an event page that always has their weekly events listed, but when they want to list a community-focused event, they are able to quickly create an event inside a custom event portal on the backend of the website and have it show on the event page.

What makes this website special: FBC Mishawaka is one of the oldest churches in the South Bend/Mishawaka community, but they have been slowly transitioning the church from traditional to modern. This website needed to have enough information to help folks get sufficient information to visit on a Sunday without needing frequent updates.

8. First Baptist Church Lafayette

CMS: Custom WordPress Website

Sermon Media Manager: We utilized the Series Engine plugin to power their sermon archive and podcast feed, saving them money because they aren’t paying for another hosting platform.

Event Management: We connected the website to their Church Management Software so that all events and registrations are connected directly to their software. We used Display.Church and displayed events on each ministry page and master calendar pages. We also used Planning Center’s “featured events” add-on to feature key events, ensuring that these events don’t get lost.

What makes this website special: FBC Lafayette had more content per ministry and page than any other website that I have ever built. To make sure people weren’t stuck infinitely scrolling, we used sections that feature images that bleed all the way to the side of the website and accordions to hide content until the website visitor is ready to view the content.

9. Salem Church of God

CMS: Custom WordPress Website

Sermon Media Manager: We utilized the Series Engine plugin to power their sermon archive and podcast feed, saving them money because they aren’t paying for another hosting platform.

Event Management: We used software called Modern Events Calendar to power their event calendar. This allows us to properly categorize each event to show on specific pages, and, when needed, to accept payments for special events that require a registration cost.

What makes this website special: We have two fun features on this website. On the homepage, we included a small button in the first section that allows people to see the title of the latest sermon with a button to “watch now.” This is connected to the sermon media library and automatically updates when a new sermon is added. We also included many loading effects to give the website life and interaction.

10. Thomasville First Baptist Church

CMS: Custom WordPress Website

Sermon Media Manager: We utilized the Series Engine plugin to power their sermon archive and podcast feed, saving them money because they aren’t paying for another hosting platform.

Event Management: Thomasville FBC used Church.Co to bring their Planning Center events directly into the website, allowing us to natively integration each ministry’s events and the church’s entire event calendar.

What makes this website special: Thomasville includes all of their life groups on the website! Rather than just state that they have life groups, they show you all of the groups. They also have a very detailed and intentional “serve our community” ministry, and the webpage had to include extensive information about each ministry; we used clickable pop-ups to show all of that information.

Why are these church websites all built on WordPress?

I personally believe that WordPress is the best software to build church websites for multiple reasons:

• WordPress has virtually no limitations, meaning you can build anything you want and need.
• WordPress is non-proprietary, meaning you own the website rather than renting it.
• WordPress has great plugins to help you have a great-looking sermon media archive and event calendar.
• WordPress allows you to integrate with many different church management software and third-party software, including various e-mail marketing software like MailChimp or Constant Contact.

For each of these custom church websites, we were able to use different tools and software because the website was on WordPress. Rather than having a website built inside other tools like Squarespace, WIX, Weebly, or Webflow where you have to use their set-ups and their tools, you get to determine how you want to build the website and ensure that you only have what you need.

All this being said, I would be remiss to say that WordPress can be a very intimidating platform to use and operate. WordPress, at first glance and setup, is complicated simply because you have multiple decisions to make and options to select to get started, such as choosing a theme, builder, plugins, etc. There are many courses to help you get started, but each of these churches elected to hire a church website design specialist to get their website online quickly, correctly, and efficiently.

What are the best plugins to include on your church’s website?

On WordPress, you are able to use both free plugins and premium (paid) plugins. Here are the ones I recommend:

Free Plugins

• Burst Statistics
  • WordPress doesn’t provide a statistics plugin built in – you must use your own. Many churches use Google Analytics, but in today’s privacy-first world, you want to keep Google off your website as much as possible. Burst Statistics shows you everything you need to know, without potentially breaking national and international privacy laws.
  • Burst Statistics
• Fluent Forms
  • There are many different contact forms on the WordPress market, including Ninja Forms, WP Forms, Contact Form 7, and Gravity Forms. Fluent Forms has a premium version of the plugin, but the free one offers all you need. Plus, it’s a lightweight plugin, ensuring that the website doesn’t slow down when loading.
• The Events Calendar
  • If you need a simple plug-and-play calendar to show your church’s events, this is the best plugin available.
• Slim SEO
  • This helps ensure your website page titles and descriptions are properly set up for search engines
  • Most people like to use Yoast SEO, but Slim SEO is faster and less bloated, resulting in better performance
• OMFG
  • When you use Google fonts on your website, you are allowing Google to access your visitors’ information, just as if you have analytics on your website, resulting in a potential breach of privacy laws. OMFG brings every font into the website.
• Redirection
  • If you decide to change the URL structure of your website, you want to make sure the website doesn’t have dead links. The Redirection plugin helps ensure that people are redirected to the correct page.

Premium/Paid Plugins

These are my favorite paid plugins:

• FluentForms Pro
• Modern Events Calendar Pro
• WP Permatters
• WP Rocket
• Series Engine
• Analytics WP

When is it time to hire a professional website designer?

Honestly, the answer is pretty simple – when you’re ready to have your church’s website work FOR your church, not against your church. In church life, we try so hard to DIY everything (which, when I was pastoring with a boot-strap budget, I was right there with you), but there comes a time to call in a professional. When you hire a website professional, you can be sure:

• The website is built to be found in search engines
• Ready to help people go from online visitor to in-person worshipper
• Ready to bring the church into the 21st century

All this allows you to have the time and space to focus on your people, while I focus on your website.

Ready to get started on your church website project?

Fill out the contact form below. I can’t wait to hear from you!