It’s no news that every church needs a website to increase its reach and keep members engaged in church activities.
However, building a church website by yourself can seem challenging if you lack programming knowledge, and hiring good web developers or designers can be expensive.
Luckily, you no longer need to be techy to build a church website of your own. With the right tools, you’ll find that this process can be not only rewarding but also fun, too. That’s why in this article, we’ve decided to gather the best church website builders and reviewed them to help you pick the one that’ll suit you best.
Table Of Contents
Choosing a church website builder
To choose a builder for your church, there are some factors you need to consider:
Your audience
You need to know your core purpose for building a website. Is it to attract new members? To create an online community where members can engage in church activities such as prayer, service, or donations? To sell event tickets?
Knowing the purpose of your church’s site helps you identify the features you should look for in a builder. For example, if you mostly plan to feature church activities, you will need to make it easy for members to download existing sermons and live stream programs. On the other hand, if you want a church website that is specifically designed for selling merchandise and event tickets, you will need to have a store.
Regardless of the goal for your website, there are some key features you should include:
- A calendar for members to book meetings.
- A live stream for virtual Sunday services.
- Options for online giving.
- Social integration.
Ease of use
A church website builder should make your life easier, not harder. Therefore, it’s important to pick a website builder that is easy to navigate and has ample resources on how to use it effectively. You’ll also want to check if the tool you’re considering offers a variety of well-designed website templates for churches. These will help you get set up much faster, especially if the design isn’t really your thing.
Content management
As a church, you may want to upload sermons, receive prayer requests and donations, and even conduct live streams on your website to make it easier for your members to engage virtually in your church community. You may also want a place where volunteers or administrators can access additional functions.
If this is you, pick a website builder that has a solid content management solution that can achieve all of these with ease.
Budget and pricing
When budgeting for your church website, you should examine whether the website builders you are considering provide the features you want for your dream website. You’ll also want to determine if the plans offered by the website builder incur additional charges for extra features. The most important features to look out for are:
- Hosting: A good web hosting provider ensures your servers are secure, which is important for combating cyber-attacks.
- Custom domains: A custom domain reflects your church brand and makes your website look less generic. If you want to stand out and increase your visibility, avoid plans that don’t offer this option, as tempting as they may seem.
- Storage space: If you plan to showcase sermons, video highlights, and memorable pictures on your website, you will need lots of storage space.
SEO-friendly
Having a website only gets you so far — it also needs to show up in search results. Pick a church website builder that makes it easy for you to optimize for search so people looking for churches within your location(s) can find you.
Mobile-friendly
Since most web surfing happens on mobile devices, make sure the website builder supports responsive design, which helps your website adapt to different screen sizes.
Support
To ensure that you can deal with unforeseen issues, pick a church website builder with great customer support. Check their reviews online to see what others say about their support team. You can even reach out to them to see how they respond firsthand.
Did you know? GetResponse has just recently won a Bronze Stevie Award for their Sales & Customer Service – available to all our customers, 24/7.
Here are the 10 top website builders for churches
- GetResponse
- WordPress.org
- Sharefaith
- Nucleus
- Squarespace
- Tithe.ly
- Clover Sites
- Ekklesia360
- Wix
- Weebly
1. GetResponse Free Church Website Builder
The GetResponse Free Website Builder is a hassle-free and cost-effective web builder for businesses and NGOs. Our AI-powered wizard helps you create a unique and beautiful website by asking you simple questions like “What kind of website do you want to build?” and “What type of business do you have?” Based on your answers, the AI builder will recommend features that you can use to start building your website.
If you want to add additional features, the website builder has a custom code block feature that lets you add external buttons or scripts. With these buttons, your website can synchronize with services like Paypal and Donorbox to easily collect donations through your website. This will also reduce your church’s dependency on the physical collection of funds from your congregation, which is slow and time-consuming.
GetResponse is equipped with everything you need to set up your website and promote it too. You can build your email list, set up email campaigns, run paid ads, launch web push notifications, run webinars, and more all in one place without having to juggle multiple tools.
In a nutshell, if you know your main goal for your website is to reach new people and encourage them to visit your church, GetResponse is the best option for you.
Pros
- GetResponse has a host of marketing tools that synchronize with their website builder.
- There are no plugins within the builder, which reduces bugs and incompatibility issues.
- It offers free hosting, allowing you to get familiar with the website building dashboard at your own pace without costing you a fortune.
- The AI builder lets you add custom HTML, CSS, and Javascript. This is useful for effecting design changes not included in the HTML of your website pages or for adding external services, like donation buttons.
- Coming soon is the migration of existing websites to GetResponse. Transferring your website and its data to the AI builder will be able to be done with just a few button clicks.
- If you don’t have you own domain yet, you can buy one directly through GetResponse, and it’ll create an email account for you automatically.
Cons
- There is no content management system for a blog, but you can easily link out to a blog from the menu.
Pricing
GetResponse has four pricing plans tailored to fit all church sizes and budgets. They include:
- Free plan: Includes the website builder, email marketing, landing pages, signup forms, etc.
- Email Marketing plan, starting from $15/month. Includes email marketing, website builder, autoresponders, landing pages, and more.
- Marketing Automation plan: starting from $49/month. Includes marketing automation, webinars, sales funnels, and more.
- Ecommerce Marketing plan: starting from $99/month. Includes ecommerce segmentation, web push notifications, quick transactional emails, and more.
- MAX plan: This is a custom solution that offers many additional features, such as SMS marketing and dedicated support. You’d need to contact GetResponse to get a quote.
Pro tip: GetResponse also offers a 50% discount for NGOs.
2. WordPress.org
WordPress.org is a completely free, open-source software, which means you can modify your church website as much as you like.
Since WordPress.org is self-hosted, you own all the rights to the website you create and the data generated within it. You are not limited by terms and conditions, nor do you risk breaking any web rules, which can lead to your website being suspended. For example, website builders like Weebly don’t allow any SEO practice aimed at improving Google rankings.
This popular website builder has hundreds of church templates and thousands of plugins and extensions that can expand your website’s functionality. You can add elegant themes through a drag-and-drop editor like Divi. You can track your website stats with plugins like JetPack or perform advanced SEO edits with plugins like Yoast. You can upload sermons, host live webinars, accept donations — the options are endless. The main downside? Most of these plugins and templates aren’t free.
Also, because WordPress offers so much customization, creating your church’s site can be intimidating. Once you’re through the building stage, though, everything from content creation and management to uploading media becomes a breeze.
Be careful: WordPress.org is often mistaken for WordPress.com, which is a hosting service created by Automattic. These are two completely separate services.
Pros
- There are a lot of templates to choose from.
- It is easy to limit access and give permissions to specific people.
- The content management system is excellent.
- There are easy-download plugins to add any feature you want for your church website.
Cons
- You need to be tech-savvy to create a custom website.
- You’re responsible for your website security, hosting, and domain.
- Using multiple plugins can make your website slower.
- To do more advanced things, you’ll need to install additional plugins which don’t come free.
Pricing
WordPress is free to download and install. However, you’d have to buy your hosting and domain from another service like Bluehost, HostGator, or Hostinger for your WordPress website to go live. Also, while good plugins and templates are available, they usually come at a price.
3. Sharefaith
Sharefaith offers a website builder created specifically for churches. With this builder, you won’t need to sift through tons of irrelevant templates, such as those for blogs or businesses. Everything from the plugins to the buttons and themes are all specifically for churches.
Sharefaith has an intuitive interface for adding media, links, and other features to your website. You don’t need to be a web design guru to use it, nor do you need in-depth coding knowledge to get started.
Everything you need to design your website is broken down into six main tabs: App, Content, Design, Settings, Updates, and Help. The Content tab, for instance, lets you create and manage pages and blog posts, while the Settings tab allows you to set up your website name and configure your sermon settings.
Sharefaith uses a drag-and-drop editor, thereby allowing you to take maximum control over how your church website will look. Once you are done building your website, they will provide you with a web hosting panel that you can use to add a domain, integrate staff accounts, and manage access.
Pros
- It is simple and easy to navigate — just pick a template and customize the layout.
- It allows you to migrate your current church website.
- It’s equipped with Sharefaith Giving, a feature that lets you effortlessly accept donations.
- You get access to over 90,000 high-quality graphics and other media from the Sharefaith library.
- You can add multiple users to your website and control their access to your content.
- There is a Google-integrated calendar to help you plan church events.
- They offer a demo version that allows you to try out the interface without paying any fees.
- The support team is efficient, and you can contact them 24/7 through email or live chat.
Cons
- It doesn’t have advanced SEO settings, so you can’t edit your site’s meta description or change how it appears on search engines.
- You might experience delay periods between dragging and dropping text and other elements, like a contact form, to your website.
- Sharefaith only offers 100GB storage, limiting users who plan to use a lot of media content on their website.
- The membership plans are pricey, so it’s unsuitable for churches on a tight budget.
- The interface is limiting. Besides the templates and elements it offers, you can’t install any additional plugins or extensions.
Pricing
Sharefaith has six membership plans, three of which include a website:
- Web + Media: $55/month or $50/month if billed annually. Includes church websites plus three domains, sermon library, email and phone support, website migration, and more.
- Suite Essentials: $93/month or $84/month if billed annually. Includes all features of Web + Media plan plus mobile app integration, kids membership, online giving, and more.
- Suite Complete: $299/month or $269/month if billed annually. Includes all features of the other plans plus advanced church streaming, worship planning deluxe, ShareFaith Connect ChMS, and more.
4. Nucleus
Nucleus solely exists for building church websites. It is especially useful if you need to get a website up and running quickly and with minimal hassle.
To build a website through Nucleus, you simply click on the template you want and all the pages you need are automatically generated. With this feature, you can create your website in just minutes without breaking a sweat.
Nucleus is also a great choice if you want to store and manage the information gathered from your website in one central hub. It integrates with notable software like Planning Center and Mailchimp to keep track of interactions with group sign-up or event forms.
The Nucleus interface is one of the simplest out there, employing a card system where users add pages in block styles. For example, if you want to add a prayer page or donation segment, you would go to the Cards tab. From there, you can add page fields and elements like headings, paragraphs, and text boxes that will enable site visitors to fill in their prayer requests or make a donation.
Once you’ve designed the pages through the back-end of the website builder, you can preview how it will look to the public before publishing the website.
Pros
- Nucleus has a rich media library filled with social media post templates.
- It has live chat support as well as an official Nucleus group on Facebook, which offers additional support.
- It has a 30-day free trial period so you can get accustomed to its interface before making a commitment.
Cons
- The support team isn’t available 24/7.
- The pricing plan is expensive compared to builders such as Sharefaith.
Pricing
Nucleus pricing plans include:
- Web: $129/month, $99/month if billed annually. Includes central hub website, form builder, sermon manager, podcast hosting, and more.
- Everything Nucleus: $249/month, $199/month if billed annually. Includes everything Nucleus has to offer, including the Giving platform, media content, 4K stock footage, and more
5. Squarespace
Squarespace is a popular website builder that can be used to create various websites. While it is not specifically for churches, it has everything you need to create a church website — from G Suite to PayPal and even built-in SEO tools.
This builder has a slightly complicated design, so if you prioritize speed in website building, this might not be the right choice for you. However, the block editor tab is similar to the one used by WordPress, so if you’re familiar with that interface, you should have no problem using it.
Squarespace also provides a generous inventory of fonts and color palettes. You can further customize your church’s website by adjusting the spaces between your content, such as headers and descriptions, to give your site an organized look.
Pros
- They offer unlimited customization, so you can really make your website stand out from the crowd.
- The free trial lets you create and preview a website before committing to a subscription plan.
- You can add and reuse media content from stock image websites like Unsplash and Pexels.
- The block editor has a donations block you can use to gather funds for your church projects.
Cons
- It’s not exclusively a church website builder, so you’ll have to fill in headers, links, and page descriptions yourself.
- The block editor is complicated and time-consuming.
- It doesn’t have an autosave feature, so you need to remember to save your website changes manually.
Pricing
Squarespace has four pricing plans:
- Personal: $23/month or $16/month if billed annually.
- Business: $33/month or $23/month if billed annually.
- Basic commerce: $36/month or $27/month if billed annually.
- Advanced Commerce: $65/month or $49 if billed annually.
6. Tithe.ly
Tithe.ly’s website builder is an ideal match for churches looking to share real-time clips or livestreams of their sermons. Viewers can also watch past streams on the website or tune in to live chats to catch up on church events.
More importantly, Tithe.ly sites synchronize with their Giving app to help church members make donations in seconds. This app is a separate tool that tracks and manages financial information about your church.
Tithe.ly also offers data protection through experienced system admins, who monitor and detect unusual activities within the server. These activities are then remedied with periodic updates to ensure you don’t experience any data loss.
Pros
- Livestream integration with YouTube and Vimeo allows site visitors to catch up on church services and events easily.
- Tithe.ly sites offer server backup and security updates to prevent data loss.
- Their plans include unlimited storage and the ability to add multiple user accounts.
- They offer six different ways to give, all synchronized through one central platform. In addition, members can set their donations to automatically recur for consistent giving.
Cons
- It takes time to process donations before they are deposited into your church’s bank account, usually two to three days.
- Migrating data from your current website is difficult.
- The notification system is slow, and sometimes you don’t get notified when a person donates through the site.
- Transaction fees are deducted from all your donations.
Pricing
Tithe.ly’s has two subscription plans that include a website:
- Site: $19/month, as well as a one-time setup fee of $149. Includes a website and giving platform.
- All-Access Plan: $99/month. Includes the above as well as their church app, text messaging, email newsletter, and church management software.
7. Clover Sites
Clover Sites has a beginner-friendly interface for building a church website. The interface guides you through every step of your site creation.
Once you choose to set up your site information, such as the website name, there’s a “Next Step” button that shows you the elements you can add to your site. You can choose to add media content, forms, or links to external websites, and so on.
Once you make your selection, you can drag and drop the element onto your website. You can also edit the theme colors and fonts to create an original look.
Unlike other website builders, the Clover Sites dashboard offers Easy and Advanced tabs that offer two different methods for creating and editing your website. The Easy tab limits what you can edit to only the essentials so that beginners are not confused and have a clear sense of what they’re doing.
Pros
- The setup process is easy and fast. You can build your website in minutes.
- You can redesign your site even after you’ve published it.
- The Easy and Advanced editing modes.
- The customer support team is resourceful and helpful
Cons
- They don’t have many templates/designs to choose from, so the designs are a bit generic.
- There’s a $500 setup fee attached to most of the plans for creating websites, which may not work for you if you’re on a tight budget.
- You can’t schedule blog posts ahead of time as you can with other website builders like WordPress.
- The support team isn’t available 24/7.
Pricing
The pricing plans for Clover Sites include:
- Website: $34/month with a $500 setup fee. Comes with search-engine-optimized website templates, automatic updates, social media integration, and more.
- Website + App + Media: $50/month with a setup fee of $500. Comes with all the features of the plan above plus access to push notifications, graphics, bulletin templates, and more.
- Website + Media + People: $99/month with a $500 setup fee. Includes all features of the above plan plus access to workflow and group management, automated messaging systems, volunteer scheduling, and more.
- Website + App + Media + Live Streaming: $159/month with no setup fee. Includes all the above features and live streaming services.
8. Ekklesia360
Ekklesia360 is suitable for churches that want to gather and monitor insights on their church members. It is equipped with church management software that lets you track information such as attendance and donations.
Similar to other church website builders, Ekklesia360 offers a wide collection of templates to choose from. These templates have already been designed with pages containing the information you’d like to manage and share (staff, events, sermons, etc.). All that’s left for you to do is choose a specific page or section you want to add to your church’s site.
At first glance, the editor for this web builder can be intimidating. If you look through their tutorials, you’ll come across terms like “monklet” and “anchor page navigation”. While they do offer detailed setup guides using their templates and features, this may still be overwhelming.
To remedy this, Ekklesia360 provides an “Easy Edit” option. When you click on it, you can make changes to your site by navigating through the front end and clicking on the elements you want to change. They also offer a demo version that you can use to practice building your church’s site for 30 days to see if this builder is right for you.
Pros
- Great support system with tons of resources to guide you through their builder. Customer support is also highly responsive.
- An automated system that helps your congregation pay tithes, offerings, and donations with ease.
- Migration of data from your old church website is both possible and simple.
- The interactive calendar system lets you update your congregation on events.
Cons
- The website building interface is complicated. You could easily get confused trying to create page sections and use other elements, like the HTML editor.
- The pricing is not suitable for churches on a budget.
Pricing
To build a custom website with Ekklesia, you must subscribe to one of the following plans:
- Demo version: Free to use for 30 days. However, you can’t publish your website unless you purchase a plan.
- Basic plan: $65/month or $702 annually. Includes web hosting, phone and email support, social media integration, and more.
- Plus plan: $90/month or $972 annually. Includes the same features as the basic plan but offers more of them, such as giving you 50 pages instead of 20.
- Advanced plan: $185/month or $1998 annually. Includes the same features as the Plus plan but offers more of them.
- Pro plan: Includes custom-designed website design. To get a quote for this plan, contact the Ekklesia360 support team.
9. Wix
Like most other website builders, Wix adopts a drag-and-drop style for adding elements to websites. This makes it user-friendly for both large and small businesses who need to create their website without the stress of dealing with a confusing interface.
Wix offers many templates to choose from, which you can then personalize to make your church website stand out from the rest. You can add eye-catching backgrounds, customize the colors and fonts, and configure the widths and sizes of all the elements you add to your website.
You can edit your site images directly through Wix, including adjusting brightness, contrast, and saturation. Additionally, you can create custom logos to give your church website a more professional look and even set up favicons for your website URL.
Wix does offer free hosting, but it comes with watermarks and Wix branding. For example, you’ll have a notice at the top of your site that declares “This site was designed with Wix.com…” Similarly, they offer a free domain, but the URL will include a Wix tag (e.g., https://churchwebsitebuilder.wixsite.com).
If you prefer, you can purchase a custom website domain (e.g., https://churchwebsitebuilder.com) either through Wix or through another service. However, to connect to that domain, you’ll need to upgrade to one of their paid plans.
Pros
- Limitless customization of your church website design.
- The advanced SEO settings allow you to add a meta description and tags for your site and preview what it will look like on search engines.
- You can add interactive elements like buttons and email subscription forms.
- They offer a rich app library with free and paid apps that’ll help you boost your website design and performance.
- You can add multiple users and control their access to the content on the website.
Cons
- Once you begin editing a template for your church website, you have to stick with it. Picking another one means starting from scratch.
- The free version comes with watermarks and Wix branding.
- Accessing features or tools like Google Analytics requires you to upgrade your plan.
- Your website isn’t transferable from the Wix platform to any other website builder. You may have to restart your website design if you want to switch to another platform.
Pricing
Wix has four plans for website building and management:
- Connect Domain: $4.50/month. Includes 500MB storage space and 1GB bandwidth, Free SSL certificate, and 24/7 customer care.
- Combo: $8.50/month. Includes custom domain, 2GB bandwidth, 3GB storage space, the removal of Wix ads, and more.
- Unlimited: $12.50/month. Includes site booster app, visitor analytics app, 10GB storage space, unlimited bandwidth, and more.
- VIP: $24.50/month. Includes 35 GB storage space, unlimited bandwidth, professional logo, priority customer care, social media logo files, and more.
10. Weebly
Weebly is one of the most affordable website builders out there. Its pricing plans are suitable for all kinds of churches and church websites, so you are sure to find one that fits your needs.
Although Weebly is not exclusively for building church websites, it’s rich in features that can help you create one with ease. An example is its ecommerce support feature that lets you accept donations from your congregation. There’s also an app library where you can drag and drop media players into your website to share audio and video from your sermons.
While the features are good, the templates are not as flexible as Wix’s. You can’t drag and drop elements like media or buttons anywhere you want them to go — there are specific positions where you’re allowed to place them. If you try to drop them outside those areas, the website builder will automatically return them to the supported positions.
This is fair if you’re not looking for a complex design, but if you want to unleash your creativity on your church website, you might be disappointed.
Pros
- The interface is user-friendly, so you can build a website quickly and easily.
- Their support team is available 24/7 to handle complaints or walk you through the website creation process.
- You can control and monitor how church members access content on the website.
- You can edit your website even after publishing it.
Cons
- Weebly doesn’t have a search feature for their templates, so you have to scroll through them until you find a template you like.
- You can only contact the support team if you subscribe to the Pro plan or higher. Same for controlling and monitoring member access.
- The apps and media players you can include on your website are limited.
- The ecommerce support charges 3% fees on donations made through your site.
- The two cheapest plans include an ad for Weebly at the bottom of the site.
Pricing
Weebly has free plans, which you can use to set up your church website. However, the free plan is limited. In order to access premium features, you’ll need to select one of their paid plans:
- Personal: $5/month, billed annually. Includes connecting to a custom domain, a shipping calculator, pop-up notifications, and more.
- Professional: $12/month, billed annually. Includes a free domain, video player, advanced site stats, removal of ads, and more.
- Performance: $25/month, billed annually. Includes additional ecommerce features and priority support.
Church website builder FAQs:
How much does it cost to build a church website?
The cost of building a church website depends on :
- The website builder you decide to use.
- The hosting platform you’re using.
- The template you’re using.
- The plugins or extensions you add.
How do I start a free church website?
GetResponse, Wix, and Weebly all offer free domain plans to help you get your website up and running. However, these plans can sometimes be limited. For example, both Wix and Weebly place ads directly on your website. To remove them, you’d need to subscribe to their paid plans.
If you are on a serious budget but need more functionality, consider using a free web builder like WordPress.org, and then go through an affordable hosting service such as Bluehost, Hostgator, or Namecheap.
Conclusion
By comparing the features and prices of the web builders we’ve shared here, you can find the best church website builder for you. However, publishing your website is just the first step — you’ll also need to promote it so that new and existing members can find and use it. To achieve that, you need to optimize it locally.
When someone wants to attend a virtual church service or find a church near their location, they either ask friends or search on Google. Optimizing your website helps potential new members find your church, giving you a leg up against other churches in your area
There are several steps you can take to improve your local SEO:
- Claim and optimize your Google My Business.
- List your church in authoritative directories like FourSquare, MojoPages, and Show Me Local.
- Add Google Map directions on your website.
- Ensure that your church name, address, and phone number are accurate and consistent across all online pages.
- If your church has multiple campuses, create a unique landing page for each campus with their specific contact information.
Want to learn more about Local SEO? Here are some more tips for SEO success.
And if you’re ready to build your church website today, why not try GetResponse? Get started right away or watch this video tutorial first.
