We are asked a lot of questions at Church Pages, but "What should I put on the home page of my Church's website?" is possibly the most common one. It's a good question and one that should be thought about when considering how well your website engages with your community.

Set the aims of your website

Before you start writing anything you should consider what the aims of your website are, in other words what are you trying to achieve through your site. Ask yourself who the Church's website is for:

• Your congregation?
• Those on the periphery of Church? 
• Those outside of the Church? Or
• All of the above.

Then you need to prayerfully set your priorities for the site.

At Church Pages our heart is for churches to reach the next generation with the Gospel, so we would place an emphasis on creating a Home page that is warm, welcoming, and engaging.

Set the objectives of your website

Once you know what you want to achieve through your website, you can start considering what you want your website visitor to experience from your website. Objectives help you to meet your aims, and they should be measurable. For example:

After visiting the Home page of our Church's website people will be able to:

• Describe what type of church we are - warm, welcoming, modern, traditional etc.
• Explain when our Church Services are.
• Describe the type of people who attend.
• Get in touch.
• Outline how the Church helps the Community.
• Find a link to a course about Christianity.
• Listen to a sermon.
• Describe what events are on at the Church.
• Find our Safeguarding Policy.

You will need to use words and images to meet your objectives, but you should now have a road map of what to put on your Home page. However, you now need to consider your demographic.

Understand your demographic

Knowing who will be visiting your website will determine its design, and by that I mean:

• the look of the site,
• the images that you choose,
• the copy that you write, and
• the calls to action you include.

It is likely that your visitors will be your congregation and people from your local community. Therefore, it helps to know more about who lives in your community, which the 2021 Census can help you with here. You can also ask local agencies and charities in your area what they consider to be the most urgent needs. Chat to your congregation too as they will have a good insight as to what is happening locally, and how your Church can respond.

As a Church you will probably know where your strengths lie, and what you are capable of doing. You'll also know who you want to attract to your Church, and how you can serve both new people and your existing congregation.

Now you can begin

With all the information you have gathered, and knowing what you want to achieve, you can begin to structure your Home page.

Unfortunately visitors take less than a second to gain an impression of your website, so you might want to consider using a video on your Home page as this has been shown to increase engagement with a page by 88% (SEMRush). Also visitors spend less than 6 seconds reading written content and so you need to make your copy simple and easy to read. Using images to convey your objectives works better, and simple calls to action aid navigation.

At all times try to think like a web visitor who is not a Christian and is possibly not familiar with the language that we commonly use in Church. Try to make sure your navigation is clear and the user's journey is easy to follow. Ultimately you are looking for a response, so make sure there are plenty of calls to action with links that work. The visitor shouldn't have to work when looking at your website i.e. look at clashing colours, different size typography, bunched images etc.. A professional designer will help you with this.

Choosing images and the style of your website will depend on who your target market is, and so ensure that your web designer knows what you want before the site is designed. Look at sites you like, both Christian and secular to get a feel for what works well.

It is also important to consider how the site will work on mobiles and tablets. This is particularly important when choosing images. Using an image with writing on it might work well on your desktop, but look at your mobile to see how it renders as the type might be chopped off.

We would also recommend making use of the footer for important links e.g. safeguarding information, and finally don't forget to add a Title Tag to your Home page to help Google to find you.

How can I find out if my website's Home page is engaging?

Once the site is launched you should see how well it is performing. The only sure way to determine this is by using analytics. If you have a Church Pages' website then we provide free web stats as part of your site, and these are really easy to understand. They provide comprehensive information on Bounce Rates, Entry Pages, Exit Pages, Visitor Behaviour, and Time Spent on your site. If you don't have web stats as part of your website package then you will need to add in Google analytics (which are also available with Church Pages).

Once you have added in your Google Analytics then you need to look at the Bounce Rate for your Home page. The Bounce Rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. According to SEMRush anything under 40% is good and anything above 60% indicates rhw page is not as engaging as it could be. Google Analytics do not automatically show the bounce rate, but the SEMRush article referenced will help you to create this report.

If the idea of adding in stats is not appealing then you could form a "Focus Group" of people outside of your Church to ask how engaging the site was. The reason for asking people from your community is that they can identify what you need to tweak to improve engagement. Try to ensure that you ask people to look at your website on different devices to make sure your site is responsive.

You can also ask new visitors to your church how they found you, and if it was through your website ask them for feedback on the site as this is always useful, even if it is difficult to hear sometimes!

If my Home page is failing to engage with my web visitors what should I do?

I would revisit the suggestions above to make sure that you are meeting the needs of your demographic. If you have a website that is aimed at students and you don't use video, and have very long written content, you are unlikely to engage with your target market. Similarly, if you're hoping to attract families and you have no images of families on your Home page then you might want to have a rethink on your images. 

Conclusion

I am always challenged by these verses in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23:

¹⁹.Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. ²⁰ To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. ²¹ To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. ²² To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. ²³ I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

Paul identifies the need to be culturally relevant when presenting the Gospel, and I think the challenge to us today is to do the same when creating a website.