As your church grows one of the biggest milestones is when you branch into a second campus. This is a huge accomplishment! You are reaching more people and growing exponentially. One question that we see come up from time to time with our Church Website builder is “How do we set up our website to work for more than one campus?” We’ve found a couple of ways that work great and we are going to cover them here.
Option 1: One Website, Campus Pages
Example: The Crossing, Las Vegas | Windmill Campus
This is the most affordable option. You have a single website and create pages for each campus. One big transition here is that your homepage now needs to direct people to the campus nearest them. So we need to feature each campus on the homepage.
With this option, we need a way to have events and blogs that are relevant to each campus. The best way to go about this is to create categories. So for every campus, we will create a category with that campus name. Then on the campus page we can display just events that are happening at that campus.
We find this method to work well if you are a team that can manage all of the campuses yourself or trust your volunteers not to edit info that is for a different campus.
This brings us to Option 2.
Option 2: Subdomains, Site per campus
Example: Influencers Church | Paradise Campus
While this option costs a bit more, it comes with some added security. Each campus has its own site and is responsible for its own content. They don’t have access to any other site so there is no risk of editing the wrong page. We find this method to be extremely effective for growing churches. When they launch a new campus, they spin up a new site at campusname.yourdomain.org. This is a very scalable option for as your grow into 3+ campuses especially in different regions and countries.
