In this digital age, you probably understand the importance of keeping up with a church website redesign. With it, you can build an online presence, reach more people, and use it as a digital evangelism tool.

But is your site doing these things? As everything revolves around new at the beginning of the year, you may be wondering if it’s time for a new website. 2022 is a great time to think about a redesign, particularly if it’s been a while (say, more than two to three years) since the last “facelift.”

Obviously, if your church website is outdated, you’ll want a redesign. If it’s difficult to navigate, yep, time for an upgrade. But what are other indicators to really know if you should invest in a website redesign? Check out the five tips below before you begin.

1. Check the Analytics

Website analytics, like Google Analytics, track interactions with your website. Analytics help you understand what your audience is viewing and what they’re not. You can use this as a springboard to determine how to move forward with your site. Who is visiting? What are they looking at? What are they clicking?

View the analytics to understand what is currently working that you’ll want to transfer to your new, updated site. Conversely, you may want to remove or change any pages that have extremely low engagement. Your analytics dashboard will give you a good idea about how to move forward with your church website redesign.

2. Listen to Feedback

What better way to find out if people find your church website user-friendly than to ask? Send out a survey, include a form on your site, or pull together a targeted group. Ask them what works well and what would make their experience better.

Some potential questions to ask to receive the feedback you’re looking for could include:

  • How often do you interact with our website?
  • What frustrations do you experience with our site?
  • What do you think our website does well?
  • How could our website help answer your questions?
  • What parts of the website are difficult to navigate?
  • Is there anything else you would like to see on the website that is not currently there?

3. Check Out Other Churches

Pay attention to what is working for other churches. Of course, you don’t want to copy exactly what another church is doing on their website. However, you can check out other successful churches and glean new ideas from their website.

Pay attention to the types of photos or graphics are they using. How is their church branding noticeable throughout the site? Do you enjoy the content they’re featuring? View the navigation menu to see what’s working well. Use the positives from other websites to help you set goals and desires for your own church website redesign.

4. Audit Your Website

Complete a website audit to find broken links, outdated copy, and missing information. If there are a lot of mistakes, it’s time for a refresh. You may even want to pull a team of people together for the audit.

Break up the task into sections. Have different people go through each page, checking for errors. These could include grammatical mistakes or links that don’t work. Then, make note of the changes that need to happen.

5. Time It Right

If it’s been more than 2-3 years, you’ll want a website redesign. Any more than that, and people will begin to notice. Design styles change and an old site can often turn people away.

On the contrary, changing it too frequently can be burdensome for your staff and frustrating for users. People like consistency, so don’t update your site too often. Think about the previous suggestions and decide if your site needs a full redesign or some simple tweaks to give it a quick update in between.

 

Ready for a Redesign?

After doing the things listed above, and you discover you do need a church website redesign, ShareFaith is here to help! We’ve got all the features you need to make your site stand out. And because we specifically serve churches, we understand your needs and what will help bring people in and get the gospel out. Contact us today to try it for free!

 

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