Church Website Design Trends + Best Practices

Your church’s website plays a crucial role in connecting and engaging with your congregation and community. By staying up to date with the latest features, trends, and best practices in website design, your church can create and maintain a compelling online presence that reflects your values, mission, and purpose. And attract new visitors to your church.

In this article, we explore some established and emerging church website themes and design trends — including the importance of storytelling through video. We also cover the essential features you’ll want to include in your church’s website experience to ensure it remains engaging and relevant for your visitors.

To learn more about creating and maintaining a great church website with Sites, book a quick demo with one of our friendly experts to see how it works.

Table of Contents

• The Important Role of Websites for Churches
• Essential Features of an Effective Church Website
• Church Web Design Trends for 2024 + Beyond
• Final Thoughts + Further Reading

The Important Role of Websites for Churches

According to the National Congregational Study Survey, there are an estimated 380,000 churches in the United States. Approximately 69% to 78% of them have websites and an online presence.

An effective website serves as a critical tool for outreach, communication, and community engagement. While all congregations and community needs vary, there are some common functions and purposes a church website serves:

• Inviting New Visitors: Church websites are designed to attract new people and encourage them to visit the church in person. Think of your church’s website as your virtual front door. It provides a first impression and is instrumental in either drawing in new visitors or turning them away.
• Connecting the Congregation: Church websites serve as a hub for congregants to access information they need — think event calendars, service times, sermon recordings, etc. This helps keep the church community informed and engaged.
• Marketing + Outreach: A church's website is considered the most important marketing tool at its disposal, surpassing other channels like social media and printed materials. It's a cost-effective way to reach a wide audience and can facilitate signups for events, accept donations, and provide essential contact information.
• Providing an Information Hub: Church websites act as a central place where both members and visitors can find valuable information like community bulletins, volunteer opportunities, and links to social media.
• Community Involvement: Websites can showcase the church's involvement in the community and highlight outreach programs and partnerships with other organizations. This can inspire others to join or support these efforts.
• Accepting Digital Donations: With a significant portion of donation and giving transactions completed with a card, websites offer a secure way for members to digitally make contributions and donate to church.
• Communicating Mission + Values: Websites provide an always on, digital platform to articulate the church's mission, core values, and beliefs. This is essential for aligning with and attracting like-minded individuals.
• Recruiting Volunteers: Almost every church can always use more volunteers. A good church website can recruit new helpers and staff by advertising opportunities and providing information on how to get involved.
• Fostering Engagement: A well-designed church website can increase engagement with the community by featuring compelling content and visuals, and by serving as a platform for members to communicate and interact with one another. People may also engage with pastors by submitting personal prayer requests on the church’s site.
• Collecting Feedback + Improvement: Websites can also give church members the ability to provide feedback on worship services and special events, which can help identify areas of improvement.

Essential Features of an Effective Church Website

When building your website, it’s important to include features and content that communicate your church's mission and provide clear, easy-to-find information. Some key elements the best church websites have include:

• Church Name + Location: Clearly display the name of your church and its location, including your address and contact information. You want people to easily be able to find you — online and in real life.
• Beliefs + Mission: Share your church's mission, values, and beliefs to help visitors clearly understand what your church stands for.
• Service Times: Help visitors plan their attendance by providing info about your service times, including days and hours. Be sure to add any special events and details folks might want to know.
• Live Streaming: Don’t sleep on live streaming! Access to services has become more important than ever, with some church members choosing to stay home from regular service. And people nowadays tend to watch a church’s live streamed service before deciding to visit in person — your Sunday live stream may well determine whether or not they come to your church.
• Sermon Pages: Include a section for sermons, allowing visitors to watch, listen to, or read past sermons and stay updated on recent teachings.
• Staff Profiles: Introduce your church staff and leadership with brief profiles or bios. Be sure to include their roles and contact info.
• Online Giving: Integrate an online giving platform to allow your members and visitors to donate to church easily and securely.
• Events + Activities: Keep an updated calendar of upcoming events, activities, and programs. This makes it easy for visitors to stay informed and get involved.
• FAQ or "What to Expect" Section: Address common questions and concerns about attending your church, such as parking, attire, and childcare availability to put potential new members at ease and prepare them for visiting.
• Welcome Video: Include a brief video that welcomes visitors and offers a glimpse into your church's community and worship experience.
• Pictures of Your Church: Use high-quality images of your church facility and the people who attend to give visitors a visual, personal representation of your community.

Church Web Design Trends for 2024 + Beyond

The world of web design is constantly evolving. Advancements in technology have considerable impacts on trends and capabilities. As web browsers, devices, and connections become faster, they enable new approaches, tactics, and techniques. Design conventions and patterns that were once considered cutting edge can quickly become overused, clunky, and dull in the process.

We’ve put together a list of emerging and established church website themes and trends that are likely to be mainstays in 2024 — and beyond.

Rich, Immersive Visuals

Sites are leveraging dense, complex, and colorful textures, patterns, and graphics that create immersive visual experiences for visitors. This shift can be seen as a welcome change from the clean and minimalistic approach to web design that’s dominated the landscape for the past decade. As computing power increases, so do the outputs, quality, and complexity of visuals that are able to be imagined, created, and communicated.

UX-Focused Design

User experience (UX)-focused design principles are foundational to church web design and aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Many websites, website building platforms, and templates will continue to leverage and implement UX best practices to maximize lead generation and conversions.

Every interaction or touchpoint is designed with the user in mind. Everything — the navigation bar, hero image, headline, animations/videos, and text — is structured to engage visitors from the first few seconds. Every piece of information on screen should be direct and immediately convey what your church has to offer and how it can benefit your readers.

Full-Screen Heroes

The need for optimized “above the fold” content continues to diminish as new generations of web users are more accustomed to varying devices, screen sizes, and scrolling. Like a giant billboard, using a large, full-screen hero image can focus your visitors’ attention on messaging.

Full-screen hero sections provide ample opportunities for creative storytelling. And when combined with tasteful animations and parallax scrolling effects, the possibilities become limitless. Just keep in mind that hero images and videos will crop and display differently based on browser and device dimensions — be sure to plan (and design) accordingly.

Giant Typography

Giant typography is a trend that’s gaining popularity in web design. Large letterforms laid out in artful display fonts can be used to create a bold, attention-grabbing visual statement. This technique is often used to highlight key info or messaging, creating a sense of scale, focus, and personality.

Mobile-First Design

Mobile-first design is an approach to designing websites and user interfaces that prioritizes the mobile user experience. It involves starting the design process with the smallest screen, i.e., a mobile phone, and then scaling up to larger screens like tablets and desktops. This approach is important due to the widespread usage of mobile devices to access the web — approximately 54% of overall web traffic comes from mobile devices.

Storytelling through Video

Video storytelling is a powerful strategy that helps address the challenge of capturing the increasingly short attention spans of audiences. By telling compelling stories, your church can creatively convey its message, evoke emotions, and call the community to take action. There are a number ways video storytelling can be utilized on websites for churches:

• Founding Members' Story: Provide a personal and engaging narrative with a video where the founding members tell your church's story together.
• Members' Testimonials: Capture and share testimonial videos from members who have experienced positive life changes. These stories can inspire others and foster a greater sense of community.
• Event Recaps: Capture short clips of highlights during church services or events. Publish them later or share them on social media with your community. 
• Authentic Stories: Use stories of regular people within the church to make your content relatable and engaging.

Final Thoughts + Further Reading

The landscape of church web design is constantly evolving. Trends, tools, and technologies come and go. Remember: What matters most is effectively connecting and engaging with your congregation and community.

BoxCast’s church website builder, Sites, provides a selection of premade church website templates that feature modern, responsive designs — with useful features that are ready from the start. Layouts are fully customizable and easy to update.

Want to learn more? Get a quick demo of Sites from one of our friendly experts. You can also give these posts a read:

• Create + Customize Your Church Website with Sites
• WordPress vs. Sites: How to Choose the Right Website for Your Church
• Squarespace vs. Sites: How to Pick the Right Church Website
• 5 Reasons to Redesign Your Church’s Website