Website options for a small church, ranked by who maintains it

The most common church website failure is a service time eighteen months out of date, because the volunteer who built the site moved to Georgia and nobody has the login.

Pick the option whose maintenance burden matches the person who will actually be maintaining it. That single decision outranks templates, platforms, and design.

The five pages that do the work

A first-time visitor arrives with four questions and leaves as soon as they are answered or as soon as they give up. Answer them above the fold, in text, on the page they land on.

Home. Church name, denomination or tradition in plain words, street address, service time, and one sentence a stranger can repeat. Not a hero video. Not a rotating slider. A visitor on a phone in a parking lot needs the address at 9:52am.

Visit. Where to park, which door to use, what people wear, how long the service runs, what happens with children, and whether anyone will single you out. Write the paragraph about children’s check-in in detail, because it is the single largest source of visitor anxiety.

Beliefs. What you actually confess. Link the full confession or statement of faith rather than summarizing it into mush. People who care read it, and people who do not care skip it in three seconds.

Sermons. The last several, playable, with the passage in the title. A church with no sermon archive is asking a stranger to trust a room they cannot hear.

Contact and giving. A real email address that someone reads, a phone number, and the giving link. Do not put giving in the top navigation ahead of Visit.

Everything else, staff bios, ministry pages, the history of the building, is optional and can wait a year.

Four paths, by who maintains it

Path one: a hosted site builder, when a staff member maintains it. Squarespace and Wix both let a non-technical person edit text without breaking the layout, which is the whole value. This post prints no figure for either, and the reason is instructive: Squarespace’s pricing page served no plan price at all to a plain fetch on 29 July 2026, only the promotional furniture around it, including “Free for 14 days. Pay annually to save up to 36%” and “Take 20% off any new website plan” (Squarespace pricing). A category priced that way cannot be quoted in an article that stays true for a year. Open the page yourself, take the number without the promotional code, and budget the renewal rate rather than the introductory one. This path is right when a paid administrator will spend twenty minutes a month on it. It is wrong when the maintainer is a volunteer who checks in twice a year, because the subscription lapses and the site vanishes.

Path two: a church-specific builder bundled with your other software. Tithely lists a standalone Custom Church Website at $19 per month and includes websites in its All-Access bundle at $119 per month, with a one-time Premium Onboarding fee of $599 (Tithely pricing, checked 29 July 2026). Subsplash includes websites in Subsplash One, which its own pricing page describes as “Pricing based on church size and usage” with no number printed (Subsplash pricing). The argument for these is that sermons, events, and giving flow from the same system you already run, so the calendar on the site is the calendar the office maintains. The argument against is lock-in: leaving takes your site with it, and a quote-only price is a price you cannot compare. Run the export test from choosing church management software on the website module too, and price the app and giving pieces separately with a church app buys one thing and what giving platforms actually cost your church.

Path three: WordPress on shared hosting. Still the most common church site in America and still a real option, with one condition. WordPress requires someone to apply updates, and WordPress says so itself: “you should always keep up to date with the latest version of WordPress,” because “Older versions of WordPress are not maintained with security updates,” and “If a vulnerability is discovered in WordPress and a new version is released to address the issue, the information required to exploit the vulnerability is almost certainly in the public domain.” On plugins the guidance is equally plain: “make sure your plugins are always updated,” and “if you are not using a specific plugin, delete it from the system” (WordPress, Hardening WordPress). An unattended site with six plugins nobody has opened in three years is running publicly documented vulnerabilities. Choose this only if a named person owns updates in writing.

Path four: a static site on free hosting. A site built as plain HTML or with a static generator, deployed to Cloudflare Pages or a similar host. Cloudflare’s free Pages plan allows 500 builds a month, one concurrent build, up to 20,000 files per site, 100 custom domains, and a 25 MiB file size ceiling (Cloudflare Pages limits, checked 29 July 2026). A five-page church site is nowhere near any of those, so it costs nothing but the domain. That page does not state a bandwidth or request cap for the free plan, so this post does not claim one. This path is nearly unbreakable, extremely fast, and impossible for a non-technical volunteer to edit. Correct when a developer in the congregation has committed to a term, and correct for a church plant that needs five pages that will not change for a year. Wrong for everyone else.

There is no path where a church gets a site that is free, beautiful, and editable by anyone. Pick which two you need.

Own the domain and the email, and prove it

This is the part churches get wrong in a way that costs money later.

1. Register the domain in an account owned by the church, with billing on a church card and the login in the church password vault. Not the youth pastor’s personal Namecheap account.
2. Two people have access. The administrator and one elder. A domain that expires because the only account holder left the church is recoverable sometimes, expensively, and sometimes not at all.
3. Turn on auto-renew and set the expiration date as a calendar reminder anyway.
4. Church email lives on the domain, not on a personal Gmail address. pastor@yourchurch.org survives the pastor. Google and Microsoft both run nonprofit programs. Google requires an organization to be “a nonprofit charitable organization in good standing” and excludes governmental entities, hospitals and healthcare organizations, and schools and universities (Google for Nonprofits eligibility). Microsoft requires a “nonprofit or non-governmental organization” with “recognized legal status in their respective country” (Microsoft nonprofit eligibility). Neither page names churches in its eligibility list or its exclusion list, so do not assume either way. Apply through the portal, read what you are agreeing to, and confirm your own status rather than trusting a summary, including this one.
5. Write down where everything lives. Registrar, host, DNS, email, analytics, who pays, and the renewal dates. One page, in the office, on paper. This document is worth more than the website. The same discipline covers every other church account, and the full list is in protecting the data a church holds about its members.

Launch order for one weekend

Friday evening through Sunday afternoon is enough time if you stop trying to design.

1. Write the words first, in a plain document. All five pages. This takes the longest and has nothing to do with software. Read the Visit page out loud to someone who has never attended.
2. Take photographs of your actual building, your actual doors, and your actual people, with permission. Stock photography of a stone church that is not your stone church tells a visitor the site is fiction. A phone camera in good morning light is fine.
3. Register the domain and set up email. Do this before the site, because DNS changes take hours to propagate.
4. Build the five pages. Resist adding a sixth.
5. Test on a phone, on cellular data, with the screen brightness low. That is the actual reading condition. If the service time is not visible without scrolling, fix that before anything else.
6. Check the address against Google Maps and your Google Business Profile. Google’s own guidelines ask you to “accurately represent your business name” as “used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery,” to “Use a precise, accurate address and/or service area,” to “Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location” rather than a central number, and to “Provide your regular customer-facing hours of operation” (Google, Guidelines for representing your business on Google). Matching name, matching address, matching phone, matching hours across the profile and the site. A church whose profile says 10:30 and whose website says 10:00 is telling a stranger to arrive at the wrong time and telling Google the record is unreliable.
7. Publish. Then set one recurring calendar event for the person who owns it: fifteen minutes on the first Monday of each month to check service times, upcoming events, and staff names.

Five things to cut before launch

• The auto-playing video header. It costs a second of load time and hides the address.
• A slider with five rotating messages. Visitors read the first one, maybe.
• A chat bubble. Nobody is staffing it.
• A countdown to the next service. It says nothing a service time does not.
• The pastor’s blog with two posts from 2021. An abandoned section signals an abandoned church. Delete it or commit to it.

When to pay a designer

Pay for design when your church has a genuine visual identity to carry, when you have real photography, and when the words are already finished. A designer handed unfinished copy will fill the layout with placeholder language that becomes permanent.

Do not pay a monthly retainer for a five-page site that changes twice a year. Pay once for the build, get the files and the accounts in the church’s name, and hold a written agreement that says the church owns the design and the domain outright.

If the words on the site still feel thin after all this, the problem is upstream. Fix the announcements and the invitation language first, using church announcement examples, and give a visitor somewhere to land with a guest follow-up system one volunteer can run.

Two more pieces sit next to the site itself. The sermon archive is a hosting decision as much as an editorial one, covered in church live streaming setup. And the website is only one of the two places a stranger checks, so set up the profiles alongside it with social media for a church with no media team and reaching a neighborhood without growth-industry tactics.

Sources

• Squarespace pricing, promotional terms only, no plan price served. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Tithely pricing, Custom Church Website $19 per month, All-Access $119 per month, Premium Onboarding $599 one time. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Subsplash pricing, Subsplash One priced on church size and usage, quote only. Checked 29 July 2026.
• WordPress, Hardening WordPress. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Cloudflare Pages limits, free plan 500 builds a month, 20,000 files, 100 custom domains, 25 MiB per file. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Google for Nonprofits eligibility. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Microsoft nonprofit eligibility. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Google, Guidelines for representing your business on Google. Checked 29 July 2026.

Wix pricing is named as a path above and no Wix figure is quoted, because that page was not opened while writing this.