We host over 1,000 church websites on The Church Co platform. Because of this, we can see the general analytics from people visiting these individual church sites. Easter was a massive weekend for the platform, with over 240,000 users coming to church sites worldwide.
We’ve processed all the data, and we thought we would share with you some of the things we’ve learned watching the user behavior from The Church Co platform.
1: Your church needs to be Search-Engined-Optimized (SEO).
Organic search for churches was responsible for bringing 45% of users to church websites.
What does that mean?
It means people who want to attend your church are more likely to do a Google search for your church than look you up on social media (which only had an 11% referral rate).
Writing blogs and creating landing pages that explicitly reference your city will help you with SEO.
2: Mobile users DOMINATED desktop users
Most users who hit church sites this Easter were mobile, not desktop — 70% mobile with only 30% desktop. Your church website has to be mobile-friendly. If you make it difficult for users to navigate your site on mobile, you will lose them. This means making design decisions that look good on mobile, with your desktop design decisions being less critical.
3: Focus your call-to-actions on getting users to sign up for your e-newsletters.
36% of users coming to sites on Easter are coming from a direct link, meaning they already had the link on hand, and we’re going directly to your website.
These are people who have interacted with you and your church before. Imagine if every person who hit your side between now and next Easter was given a reason to sign up for your e-newsletter? How many more people do you think would come to your church digitally in the next year?
Too often, we use our church’s website as a bulletin to advertise our events instead of as an extension of our ministry, communicating Jesus to the lives of those who come to us.
Instead of having a general welcome video at the top of your website with a call-to-action to attend your church on Sunday morning, capture their email and interact with them today.
One idea you can post on your site would be a sign-up for morning devotionals or a verse of the day.
This allows you to capture a user’s email and start interacting with them by giving them valuable content that speaks into their lives.