One of the best things about using WordPress for your church’s site is all the plugins that help you customize your features and performance.
Choosing the best plugins for your church website isn’t always easy, especially with thousands of options. Luckily, some stand out from the rest.
While the plugins you use vary based on your church’s needs, these will help boost any church’s site.
Sermon Manager
No church website is complete without having online sermons. With Sermon Manager, it’s easier to publish your sermons on your site. Attach audio files, embed videos from YouTube and Vimeo, attach images to your sermons and divide sermons by speaker, topics and more. It’s designed to work with all themes and works well with other third party plugins, such as Yoast SEO.
PrayBox
For a more engaging website, one of the best plugins for your church website is PrayBox. It’s a simple, yet effective plugin for submit and view prayer requests. A built-in moderation system ensures no one misuses it or posts anything inappropriate. Requesters even receive daily digests of how many times someone clicked the “I prayed for you” button.
The Events Calendar
Every church site should list upcoming events for members, visitors and volunteers. The Events Calendar plugin makes it easy to add a detailed event calendar to your church’s site. It’s designed to be ready to use within five minutes. It’ll support hundreds of thousands of events and millions of monthly site visitors. Quickly create customized calendars to increase engagement for upcoming events.
WPChurch
One of the best all-in-one plugins for your church website is WPChurch. It’s a complete church management system that combines the features of multiple other plugins. For instance, it includes a donations module, church events calendar, sermon/ministry module, newsletter features, various account types/settings and more. While it’s more complex, it gives you the tools you need to manage most areas of your church website in a single dashboard.
Yoast SEO
If you want to increase visitors, you have to optimize your church’s website. Yoast SEO takes WordPress’s built-in SEO features to the next level. Optimize content on pages and blog posts with guided fields to create better titles, choose keywords, set meta descriptions and more. Plus, you’ll see in a glance if your content meets required guidelines for a better search rank, such as the right keyword percentage and using active over passive voice.
W3 Total Cache
The last thing you want is to drive visitors away from your site due to poor performance. One of the top plugins for church websites to boost performance is W3 Total Cache. It’s used by millions of sites to speed up page loading speeds, increase search engine ranking, reduce bandwidth usage and makes it easier for visitors to interact while pages are still loading.
WP Church Center
Want to help guide new members on what to do next? Use WP Church Center to create custom cards on your website. You can even create a separate site just for new members using this plugin. From helping them learn how to volunteer to listing upcoming events they may be interested in, create and change cards as needed. It’s the perfect way to digitally welcome any new members and help answer common questions.
Give
While there are numerous plugins for your church website that focus on online giving, Give offers a growing number of add-ons to accept more payment options and add more features. While it’s not specifically for churches, it’s easy to customize to your church’s needs. Set up an option for visitors to give whenever they want. You can also set up special fundraising options and display how close you are to your goals. This is a great way to increase giving and engagement.
Not sure which plugins are best for your site? Contact us today to learn about optimizing your church’s website.
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