We reviewed over 2300 websites that use The Church Co Church Website Builder to see what worked best for churches this Easter. The Easter weekend was undoubtedly one of the most significant moments in the Christian calendar, and for churches, it represents an opportunity to connect with new visitors and engage their congregations in meaningful ways. This year, we saw an unprecedented surge in traffic over the Easter weekend, breaking records and setting a new standard for online church engagement.
Here is a break down of what happened and some suggestions for how to make Easter 2024 even bigger!
Total Users
Over the Easter weekend we saw 382,000 individuals visit church websites with 332,000 being new users.
What Can We Learn:
People that haven’t visited your website in a while or never before will check it out starting around Thursday before Easter. This might be the first interaction your church ever has with them. It’s important to think about how you can make it impactful.
How did people find churches this Easter?
If you are like most churches, you likely dabbled in some paid advertisement and social media boasting. If we look at these stats about how people got to a church’s website we can see that the majority actually came from searching google and other search engines.
What does this mean?
It means that making sure you have a solid website that is showing up when people search is the most important form of marketing. This is more important than running social media ads even. Blogging and creating landing pages for relevant content your community searches will help drive you to the top of the lists in Google. SEO is by far the most important factor when it comes to new people finding your church on Easter. Think about the needs of your community and make a task to write one piece of content a week to answer those questions they are searching for.
Where did people tune in from?
Over Easter people from all over the world tuned in to church livestreams on The Church Co Platform. The majority came from the USA where most of the churches that we work with are based but you made an impact globally to over a quarter of a million people!
How did people see church websites?
Most everyone we work with always designs there website for desktop but look at these stats below! Only 2 in 10 people will ever see that desktop design. Mobile is the most important view for a church’s website. Our suggestion is that you switch the preview to Mobile and design specifically for that view. This is how your people will see you so it’s important to put yourself in their shoes.
What pages did they visit?
We’ve touched on this before but it’s important to remember that you are never guaranteed a second click from a church website visitor. This is why we suggest putting key info on your homepage and then creating SEO content for the Easter page. The drop off from Homepage to Next page is quite significant.
What can we learn from this?
If your church prioritized a “Plan A Visit” page. It’s better to actually make that page your homepage and put a splash of information for planning a visit and for your members. People hit the homepage first so it’s important to give them what they are looking for.
What can we do to reach more people next year?
Here are three things you should do today to your website.
- Update your Easter page with a video from the live stream.
- Update the heading of your Easter page to be “Thanks for a great Easter at CHURCH NAME”
- Add the dates for Easter Next Year with some text like “Join us for Easter again next year on March 31, 2024”
One year from now you’ll have 365 days of traction in Google and that will make it easier for people searching to find you.