Over the ~10 years I have worked with churches, we have achieved some incredible results and established a very consistent track record in enhancing site traffic. Some well over 300% for consecutive months, and we’ve been delighted when clients had to upgrade their hosting due to bandwidth overload.

Members & Visitors Will Drive Traffic to an Effective Site

If you have an effective website, members and visitors will naturally become promoters of your church website. They will:

Many people reading this article may have a church website that is not achieving any of these results and will want to know …What’s the secret?

Get visitors excited enough to refer your church website and programs:

1. Your church’s online presence must look and feel like your organization in order to be compelling to your visitors. It
2. The site must provide timely and useful information to your website visitors and members or they won’t pass it on.
3. You must provide the tools (and reminders) at every level to facilitate sharing of information.

After studying visitor statistics of church sites for almost 10 years, I’ve found that one of the strongest indicators of an effective church site is the percentage of repeat visitors. If your church site isn’t yielding 50% repeat visits or more (2-4 visits monthly), you should be working to achieve it. Optimally, you want to see a growing percentage of weekly visits and a shrinking number of visitors who leave from the home page!

If your site is not compelling enough to get visitors to return it will not be compelling for visitors to refer it nor for other sites/partners to link to it.

Timely & Useful Content: 

It’s widely stated that on the Internet content is king! In order to get your site visitors to return, the content you present must keep them well informed. If the information on your church site is not timely, useful and relevant, it won’t result in a response or a return visit. Your goal is for each visitor to see an abundance of information that is of interest, current, and useful (for them to act on). Your visitors will then be much more likely to respond, return to the site to see what’s new or return to explore more of the content of interest to them.

An effective website will make member services, communications with staff, accessing materials and participating in activities much easier. Those who can’t be in physical attendance, couldn’t call during business hours, couldn’t wait in long lines on Sunday, etc. will use your church website time and time again, IF it offers the capabilities in a user-friendly way.

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