Service times, sermons,
community.
Congregations, churches, missions, faith-broadcasters. The visitor is checking your service times for tomorrow morning, or looking for last Sunday’s sermon. Keep it that simple.
Church and faith-organisation websites have a narrow set of jobs and the temptation to over-extend is the most common failure mode. Visitors want service times (current week), the sermon archive (last Sunday, last month), location with directions, and ways to participate (small groups, volunteer opportunities, giving). The home page should answer all four in the first viewport. The “our beliefs,” “leadership,” “history” sections are perfectly fine on internal pages; they don’t belong on the home page because the home-page visitor is rarely searching for them.
We made our service times the largest text on the home page. The number of first-time visitors went up the next month. We hadn’t changed anything else; we’d just stopped hiding the answer to the question everyone was already asking.
Should we live-stream our services and host the archive ourselves?
Live-stream yes — the pandemic-era expectation has stuck and is now a baseline. Archive: YouTube is almost always the right host. The discovery surface YouTube provides (search, related videos, recommendations) brings new viewers in a way self-hosted video never will. The streaming bandwidth cost on a self-hosted archive is also non-trivial — congregations underestimate it. Premium congregations sometimes prefer Vimeo for the absence of ads, but most are better served by a curated YouTube channel with a couple of donation-link cards in the description of each video.
Half the congregations we work with want a chatbot. We talk them out of it every time. The pastoral response cannot be automated without dignity loss; the operational queries the chatbot would answer (“what time is the service?”) should be answered by the homepage anyway.
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