How to Build a Church Website with WordPress (2026 Guide)

Every week, someone in your congregation types your church name into Google. What they find matters more than most church leaders realize. A missing website or an outdated one tells visitors your church stopped paying attention years ago. A well-built site tells them you care about reaching people where they already are — online.

I have built church websites for over 15 years, and WordPress remains the best platform for the job. It is free, flexible, and churches of any size can manage it without a developer on staff. This guide walks you through every step to build a church website that serves your community and brings new visitors through your doors. Whether you are starting fresh or replacing an outdated site, this is the approach that works.

Why WordPress Is the Right Choice to Build a Church Website

There are dozens of website builders out there. Wix, Squarespace, and dedicated church platforms like Tithe.ly all compete for your attention. Here is why I keep recommending WordPress after all these years.

WordPress powers over 43% of all websites on the internet. That is not a marketing claim — it is the reality of the web. This matters for your church because it means thousands of themes, plugins, and tutorials exist specifically for WordPress. You will never be stuck without a solution.

More importantly, you own your website. With Squarespace or Wix, you rent space on their platform. If they raise prices or shut down a feature, you are stuck. With WordPress on your own hosting, you control everything. Your content, your design, your data. For a church that plans to be around for decades, that ownership matters.

Cost is another factor. A complete church website on WordPress costs between $5 and $15 per month for hosting. Compare that to $200+ per month for dedicated church platforms. The money you save goes back into ministry.

What You Need Before You Build a Church Website

Before you install anything, get these three things sorted. Skipping this step creates headaches later.

1. A Domain Name

Your domain is your address on the web. For most churches, the format is simple: yourchurchname.com or yourchurchname.org. The .org extension carries a slight trust signal for nonprofits, but .com works just as well. Avoid hyphens, numbers, or anything your members cannot spell over the phone.

Register your domain through a reputable registrar. Expect to pay $10-15 per year. If you need help choosing, our guide on finding the best place to buy a domain name covers the top registrars and what to look for.

2. Web Hosting

Hosting is where your website files live. For a church website, you do not need anything fancy. Shared hosting handles the traffic of most congregations without breaking a sweat. What you do need is reliability. Your site must load fast and stay online, especially on Sunday mornings when visitors check service times.

Look for hosting that includes a free SSL certificate, one-click WordPress installation, and automatic backups. If you want specific recommendations, we compared the best WordPress hosting providers and what each one offers.

3. Your Content Ready to Go

Gather these before you start building. Having content ready turns a week-long project into an afternoon:

• Church name, address, and phone number
• Service times and locations
• A brief “About Us” story (2-3 paragraphs about your church’s mission)
• Pastor and staff photos with short bios
• A few photos of your church building and community
• Links to your social media accounts
• Any existing sermon recordings or videos

Step 1: Install WordPress

Every major hosting provider offers one-click WordPress installation. Log into your hosting control panel, find the WordPress installer, and click install. The process takes less than five minutes. You will set your site title, admin username, and password during installation.

Once installed, log into your WordPress dashboard at yourchurchname.com/wp-admin. This is where you will manage everything from now on. Bookmark it.

First thing to do: go to Settings > General and confirm your site title and tagline. Then go to Settings > Permalinks and select “Post name.” This gives you clean URLs like yourchurch.com/about instead of yourchurch.com/?p=123. Clean URLs matter for both visitors and search engines.

Step 2: Choose a Church WordPress Theme

The theme controls how your website looks and what features are built in. This is the most important decision you will make, so do not rush it.

A good church WordPress theme should include:

• Sermon management — Upload and organize sermons by series, speaker, or topic
• Events calendar — Display upcoming services, Bible studies, and community events
• Donation integration — Built-in support for online giving
• Staff directory — Showcase your pastoral team with photos and bios
• Mobile responsive design — Over 60% of your visitors will be on phones
• Fast loading speed — Visitors leave if a page takes more than 3 seconds

I have seen churches waste months trying to force a generic theme to do church-specific things. Save yourself the trouble. Start with a theme built for churches.

Benevolence is a theme I built specifically for churches and religious organizations. It includes sermon management, event displays, donation support, and a design that looks professional without being flashy. If you want to see what other church-focused options exist, we put together a roundup of the top church WordPress themes with detailed comparisons.

To install your chosen theme, go to Appearance > Themes > Add New in your WordPress dashboard. Upload the theme file, activate it, and follow the setup wizard if one is included.

Step 3: Create Your Essential Pages

Every church website needs these core pages. Do not overcomplicate it. Start with what visitors actually look for and expand later.

Homepage

Your homepage has one job: tell visitors what your church is about and what to do next. Include your service times prominently. Add a welcoming photo of your community. Include a clear call to action — “Plan Your Visit” or “Join Us This Sunday.” Keep it simple. I have seen too many church homepages try to cram everything above the fold. Give visitors a clear path, not a wall of information.

About Page

This is the second most visited page on any church website. Share your church’s story, mission, and beliefs. Include photos of your community. First-time visitors use this page to decide whether they feel comfortable showing up on Sunday. Write it for them, not for your existing members.

Service Times and Location

This seems obvious, but I have audited hundreds of church websites where service times were buried three clicks deep. Put them on a dedicated page and in your site header or footer. Include an embedded Google Map. Add parking instructions if your location is tricky to find.

Contact Page

Include your address, phone number, email, and a contact form. WordPress plugins like WPForms make contact forms easy to set up. Add your social media links here too.

Staff and Leadership

People connect with people, not organizations. Add photos and short bios of your pastors and key staff. This builds trust with visitors who want to know who leads the church before they walk through the door.

Step 4: Set Up Online Donations

Online giving is not optional anymore. Studies show that churches with online donation options receive significantly more in contributions than those relying solely on the offering plate. Your members carry phones, not checkbooks.

The fastest way to add donations to your church website is with a plugin like GiveWP. The free version handles everything most churches need: custom donation forms, recurring giving, donor management, and tax receipt emails. It connects to Stripe and PayPal for payment processing.

For a detailed walkthrough, our guide on how to accept donations on WordPress covers the entire setup process from choosing a payment processor to creating your first donation form.

Place your donation button in the main navigation menu. Add it to the homepage. Make giving easy and accessible. The fewer clicks between “I want to give” and “donation complete,” the more people will follow through.

Step 5: Add Sermons and Media

Sermon archives are one of the biggest draws for church websites. Members revisit messages. Visitors preview your teaching before visiting in person. Sermon content also gives search engines fresh, unique text that helps your site rank for local searches.

Most church WordPress themes include a sermon management system. You create sermon entries with the title, speaker, date, scripture references, and media files. Upload audio directly to WordPress or embed videos from YouTube or Vimeo.

A practical tip from experience: do not upload large video files directly to WordPress. Video hosting eats through your server storage and bandwidth fast. Upload videos to YouTube (it is free), then embed them on your site. This also helps your church get discovered through YouTube search, which is the second largest search engine in the world.

Organize sermons by series and tag them by topic. This makes it easy for visitors to find messages on subjects they care about, whether that is marriage, grief, faith, or parenting.

Step 6: Add an Events Calendar

Churches run on events. Sunday services, midweek Bible studies, youth group meetings, community outreach, holiday programs. Your website needs a clear way to display all of it.

If your theme does not include an events feature, The Events Calendar is the most reliable plugin for this. The free version handles event listings, calendar views, and location details. It integrates with Google Maps and supports recurring events.

Keep your calendar updated. Nothing damages credibility faster than an events page showing last year’s Christmas service. Assign someone on your team to update events weekly. It takes five minutes and keeps your site looking active and relevant.

Step 7: Install Essential Plugins

WordPress plugins add functionality your church website needs. Here are the ones I install on every church site I build:

• Yoast SEO — Helps your site appear in Google search results. Handles your meta titles, descriptions, and sitemaps automatically.
• UpdraftPlus — Automatic backups. Set it to back up weekly to Google Drive or Dropbox. If anything goes wrong, you can restore your site in minutes.
• Wordfence — Security plugin that blocks malicious traffic and login attempts. Churches are targets for hackers just like any other website.
• Google Site Kit — Connects Google Analytics and Search Console to your WordPress dashboard so you can see how people find your site.
• WPForms Lite — Simple contact forms, prayer request forms, and event registration forms.

A word of caution: do not install plugins you do not need. Every plugin adds code to your site, which can slow it down. Stick to the essentials. If you want to explore more options, our WordPress plugins guide covers the best plugins across every category.

Step 8: Optimize for Local Search

When someone searches “churches near me” or “church in [your city],” you want your website to show up. Local SEO is critical for churches and often overlooked.

Start with these steps:

• Claim your Google Business Profile — This is free and puts your church on Google Maps. Add your address, phone number, service times, and photos. Encourage members to leave reviews.
• Use consistent NAP — Your Name, Address, and Phone number must be identical everywhere: your website, Google Business, Facebook, Yelp, and any church directories.
• Add local keywords naturally — Include your city and neighborhood in your page titles and content. “Grace Community Church in Portland” ranks better than just “Grace Community Church.”
• Create a Google-friendly sitemap — Yoast SEO generates this automatically. Submit it through Google Search Console.

Local SEO takes time to kick in. Expect results within 2-3 months of consistent effort. But once your church ranks in the local pack, it drives steady visitor traffic without spending a dollar on ads.

Step 9: Launch and Maintain Your Church Website

Before you announce the new site to your congregation, run through this checklist:

• Test every page on your phone — most visitors are mobile
• Click every link to make sure nothing is broken
• Submit a test donation to verify the payment flow works
• Check your site speed at Google PageSpeed Insights — aim for 80+ on mobile
• Ask three people outside your church to navigate the site and give honest feedback

After launch, maintenance is straightforward. Update WordPress, your theme, and plugins when updates are available. Add new sermons weekly. Keep the events calendar current. Post a blog entry or news update at least once a month to keep the site fresh for search engines.

If you would rather have a professional handle the setup, our WordPress and theme setup service takes care of everything. We install WordPress, configure your theme, set up your pages, and hand you a ready-to-use website. You focus on ministry while we handle the tech.

How Much Does It Cost to Build a Church Website?

One of the most common questions I get. Here is an honest breakdown of what churches actually spend:

The essentials:

• Domain name: $10-15/year
• Web hosting: $5-15/month
• WordPress: Free
• Church theme: $49-79 one-time (or free options available)
• Essential plugins: Free

Total first-year cost: $130-260

Compare that to custom web development ($3,000-10,000) or dedicated church platforms ($200-400/month). WordPress gives you a professional result at a fraction of the cost. And unlike monthly platforms, you are not locked in. You own your site and can move it anywhere.