We monitored over a thousand church websites on Easter to see how people are interacting. We wanted to know what brought people to the church website, what made them stay and the results are fascinating. Was it organic search, design, mobile responsiveness? Here is what we found.
Over 168,000 people, 78% visiting for the first time came to church websites over the Easter weekend
To be exact, 168,827 people visited church websites using our platform from Thursday to Sunday. This resulted in 498,871 page views. They stayed on the websites on Average for a minute and thirty-nine seconds and clicked to around 2 pages. What can we learn:
- Be brief and to the point.
- If you were expecting people to watch last week’s sermon via your website, these stats show that that probably didn’t happen. Instead, do a sermon highlights video and keep it short. Engage and excite people for next week.
- If you broke most of your information across a few pages then it’s better to combine the info on single pages into sections. People on average clicked two pages so make sure that everyone can find what they need in no more than that.
25-34 year olds made up the highest demographic of people visiting church websites
We pulled stats on the demographic of people visiting the sites and found that highest amount of people searching were age 25-34 with all other age group representing roughly the same amount of people.
- Age 25-34 visited the most
- 45-55 was second
6 out of 10 people visited church websites on the phone
64% of people viewed the websites on their mobile phone. 31% on their desktop and 3% on a tablet. What is interesting to us is that overwhelmingly people design their websites using our desktop view but only 3 in 10 people will ever see it. The majority of people are going to see your website on their phone so when you are designing and editing your site, put the view into Mobile and make sure you spend the majority of your time on that. Luckly, our system takes care of this for you and always ensures that your site looks great across every device.
- Design for mobile.
- 6 out of 10 people only ever see your website on their phone.
Organic search beat social media in a landslide
Organic search won the race for how people found out about your churches with Social only representing around 12% of the traffic.
- Ensure your SEO settings are up to date (The Church Co Platform ensures this for you)
- Write local content to help boost your church website in search engines
- Don’t put all of your hopes on social.
The wrap up
It is always helpful to look at the data in order to learn and make decisions. What we can learn from Easter is that people want information fast. Try and make it so that people find everything they need in less than 2 clicks. This doesn’t mean add more text, it means make the important things prominent. Design for mobile. If only 3 out of 10 people ever see your website on their computer make sure you are putting your effort into your mobile website. Luckily, our system takes care of this for you but a second glance will never hurt. Put as much effort into SEO as you are into Social Media. Search Engines brought in more traffic than social media this weekend so write blogs and create content that Google and other search engines can index. If you need help with this we offer this as a service.
We’d love to hear your thoughts. If you need a new website that takes care of everything for you, sign up and we’ll have it done for you in one week.