We all know that video content is growing online, but why would you want to use this for your church website and how can you get this onto your church's site? 

Why would you want to use video content on your website?

Give people a feel for your church & community

There's only so much that you can express with words and images. Using a video can help give your website visitors the same feel as walking into your church on a Sunday morning. It can share the emotion behind your community and help people to get a better understanding of the look and feel of your church. 

A video can also help you to engage immediately with your web visitor and if "a picture is worth a 1000 words", then a short 2-minute video shot in 60 frames per second is worth 120,000 words - that's a lot of words! It is also a fact that the human brain is wired so that it retains visual content far better than a page full of text. Studies show that "the average viewer retains 95% of a message when they watch it, as opposed to a mere 10% retention rate when reading it" - Sheffield Audio Video Productions. So a video really can help to promote your church and your message.

Tell a story and build trust with people

You can use video content to connect with people on an emotional level and to build trust with them. Building trust is one of the key steps to connecting with people online, a major stumbling block for many churches these days. So if the video is entertaining or educational, people will be more likely to engage with you and your congregation.

Rank higher

As an aside video can help your church to rank higher on search engines such as Google. This is partly because including video content on your website can increase the dwell time. Dwell time is a factor that search engines take into account when ranking their search results, filtering out pages that people don't spend as much time on. Research by Forrester shows that it is actually "50 times easier to achieve a page 1 ranking on Google if you have video content" 

The potential downsides to video content

If you're not using Church Pages, using videos can slow your site down! 

If you're not using Church Pages, including large video files within your website can increase the page load speeds. This can be quite a big problem, especially with search engine ranking as pages with slow page load speeds will often be listed lower since search engines will view the page as low-quality.

It can be costly...

Video production can become a large investment, not only monetary but in time too. Aside from buying or renting the required equipment and software, a really high-quality video will also usually take a long time to plan and produce. This is where the church community may be able help - it could be worth asking your congregation if anyone has experience in this area, and getting their thoughts!  However, a poor video could very well put people off your church, but done well it could be an excellent tool to reach the unchurched.

How can you use video with Church Pages?

1. Directly onto a page i.e. homepage

Believe it or not, you can put a video directly into your Church Pages website using the Image Gallery (the same gallery that is used for your pictures!). 

The Image Gallery lets you upload images and files to be used on your website. Using the Image Gallery for your video content can be very useful for including videos within your website design, such as an auto-playing video on a homepage. This is because they can be styled easier than an embedded video from a video hosting platform. It's also a great option if you want your video to be exclusive to your website.

2. Embed a YouTube /Vimeo video

Additionally, you can also use a video hosting platform such as YouTube or Vimeo and embed your content from there directly.

YouTube is the second largest search engine and processes more than 3 billion searches a month. Using YouTube to upload your video content to is a great way to make your video accessible to the over 1 billion unique monthly visitors that watch content on the platform. YouTube also has easy share buttons that encourage viewers to share video content to their social media feeds. The page load speeds for your website will be faster if the video is hosted on YouTube as opposed to uploading it to your website.

Vimeo is an online video hosting platform with high-quality video encoding and video quality. Vimeo prefers quality over quantity and their video processing shows this by focusing on making sure that all videos on their platform have high-quality image and audio content. Like YouTube, Vimeo videos can be embedded into your eCommerce website and is a quick and easy process.

How have Church Pages sites used video?

St Margaret's, Angmering 

St Margaret's, Angmering is a Church Pages website that recently made their site live. Featured on their homepage is their high-quality and engaging introduction video. It's too early to show how this has affected their web stats, but we're expecting great things.

Can we help?

If you would like to know more about how you can take advantage of using video content with your Church Pages website, or the other ways you can get creative with sharing about church online, do not hesitate to get in touch with our team here, or leave a comment!