An overview to church website engagement

What is website engagement and why is it important for churches?

Essentially engagement is when a site visitor engages with your website content either by reading it, scrolling through it, clicking on navigation links, sharing content, clicking on buttons, (which are often referred to as calls-to-action) or filling in forms. Increased user engagement results in more people getting in touch with you, coming to visit you, or giving donations through the site, more people finding your church or organisation and increased satisfaction for your congregation.

How do you know how engaging your church website is?

It's possible to measure engagement using analytics and we are often asked how to both increase and shape engagement. Another good idea could be to give our site to a group of users (particularly ones who don't know your church or organisation!) and watch their reaction - don't ask them - just look at when they mentally clock-out. There are tools which help show your users current journey i.e. Hotjar, that can help you see how your visitors are engaging with your site. If you'd like one of our design team to give you their professional opinion, do not hesitate to get in touch. 

How do I improve my church website engagement? 

There are five basic guidelines outlined below to follow to ensure basic engagement with your website to decrease your bounce rate (a site visitor leaving your site before engaging with anything). In addition to these basic guidelines, there are further things you can do to try to shape specific a specific journey you would like a customer to take which ultimately will lead to them either visiting you, donating to you, or getting in touch with you. 

Five basic 'rules for making an engaging church website'

1. Deliver great content

Essentially if your visitor isn't interested in your content, they won't stick around. Great content is best initially delivered through engaging images which trigger an emotion and engaging headlines which encourage further reading of your church site. 

What can I do about this? Keep reading and find our tips for creating engaging content below.

2. Make sure the website speed is as fast as possible

Even a delay of a half a second reduces the time that visitors will engage with your site. Because it's such an important factor in site engagement, Google has included site speed as part of their ranking algorithm.  

What can I do about this? Read our guide to site speed and, if you're an Church Pages customer, this is something we handle as part and parcel of your hosted service.

3. De-clutter your site design and break up your content.

This makes your site content possible to be absorbed by a visitor as quickly as possible with as little cognitive load as possible. Breaking up your content into easily absorbed chunks also improves engagement.

What can I do about this?  This is one for your website designer however, when you're creating something do have this rule in your mind i.e. put subheadings and other interesting media within your content (blogs/pages etc). 

4. Simplify your site navigation

This makes your content as easy to find as possible for a user. Any level of frustration at not being able to find something or it taking too long decreases site engagement.

What can I do about this? Measure the clicks to purchase and try and streamline/reduce this as far as possible. This could involve using a mega-drop menu, another heading on your horizontal navigation or including a sticky-nav. Again, it could be worth talking through with your website designer. 

5. Include clear calls-to-action

Make a clear action you'd like your site visitor to do. This could be 'add comment' or 'read story' or 'give now' or 'find out more'. Make it clear to a site visitor what action is available to them to do next.

What can I do about this? Name for every piece of content on your website the 'action' you'd like your user to take and make sure this is clear. 

The nuts & bolts of church website engagement

How do I deliver great content for my website visitors?

"Deliver great content" is a three word statement covering vast possibilities but essentially all content on a website is delivered through words and images which are placed on your church website. The decisions of what, how and where to place them are design decisions and some of this work is done at the point of your site design which you can discuss with your web designer. However, there is always ongoing content creation and it is helpful for anyone to have engagement in mind when they are creating content for your website.

Images are one of the most important factors in your site engagement. They are the single most important thing to affect the likelihood of someone coming to visit your church who has never been before. Images have been shown to increase engagement by up to 300%.

How do I choose engaging images?

For banners and all other site imagery, it’s essential to pick images that fit your church’s voice, style, and mood which appeal to your church website visitors. Images which communicate relationship, friendship, love, warmth, joy, compassion or other strong positive emotions tend to work best. There are so many styles out there, but even if some appeal to you, that doesn’t mean they’re going to fit. It's important to think of the site visitor and what will appeal to them first. 

An example of a site which has great engaging images which are consistent throughout is Christ Church Fulham The banner images are well shot with balanced colour and a great sense of relationship and warmth. 

How do videos help with website engagement? 

Videos are being used increasingly on websites and can really help to capture the story of a brand more completely than a static image can. One of the best videos we have seen is the one made for St Margaret's Angmering. The use it as the main banner on the home page which gives a great overview of the church, the community, the friendship and a feeling for the people who are current members of the church. You can then click through from the call-to-action on home page to 'watch the video' and see it with sound and hear how people in the church describe the church and how the warmth and friendliness links through to helping with their faith. 

How do you use the 'rules of engagement' to get your website visitor to make contact or visit your church?

This really is the key point of engagement. You want your customers to engage with your website to ultimately interact with your church or organisation, or story in a way that prompts them to take an action such as visiting you, or contacting you. For Churches, this is engaging with your site to the extent that your visitors want to visit you, listen to your sermons, get involved with teams, donate to you or maybe sign up to Alpha. 

So, you can use all of the above to shape particular desired outcomes for your visitor. This is often referred to as a 'customer journey' which is essentially a designed path which a site visitor will take through your website to an end action (often to get in contact or similar).

There are often multiple possible customer journeys within the one website. For instance it is usual to offer a number of options to get in touch through online chat, contact forms and telephone numbers which are made to be all clearly visible. If this is the only desired outcome, it is usual to add in 'call-to-action' buttons within banners or sometimes dotted throughout a page all leading to the one contact form to get in touch or get a quote. Shaping engagement at this level is something usually done by your web designer. However, you are able to do some shaping yourself through adding calls-to-action within your news posts, breaking up content with subheadings in news posts or adding related content or videos to news posts. 

How far can you go when creating a customer journey? 

This process above should be continual and constantly updated. After all, your visitors are constantly changing their patterns of behaviour and your site has to remain engaging and current. It's useful to constantly be aware of your website engagement through looking at your analytics. Periodically, it's very valuable to have a design review of your site. Should you like to have our support, do not hesitate to get in touch and it would be great to get your comments below.