Guides Foundation
What belongs on the first screen of a church website
Four questions a visitor is asking before they scroll, and how to answer all of them above the fold.
A first-time visitor gives your homepage a few seconds before deciding whether your church is worth the effort of a Sabbath morning. In those seconds they are not reading your mission statement. They are checking whether the practical details are there.
Almost every church website we are asked to fix has the same problem: the first screen is a photograph and a welcome sentence, and the useful information starts three scrolls down.
The four questions
Where do you meet, when do you meet, what happens when I arrive, and what should I do next. If your first screen answers those four, it is doing its job.
Everything else — your history, your pastor’s biography, the conference structure — matters to members, not to the person deciding whether to come. Move it down the page. Nobody who wants it will fail to find it.
Put the service time in text
Service times set inside a graphic cannot be read by search engines, cannot be copied into a calendar, and disappear for anyone using a screen reader. Write them as text: the day, the time, and the words “Sabbath (Saturday)” for people who do not know what Sabbath means.
Add the full street address, also as text, and link it to a map. A visitor standing in a car park with one bar of signal should not have to pinch and zoom into a poster to find out which entrance to use.
Use photographs of your actual church
Stock photographs of a smiling crowd tell a visitor nothing, and most people recognise them instantly. Photographs of your own building, your own foyer and your own members tell them what they will walk into.
The most useful photograph on a church website is usually the least dramatic one: the entrance, taken from the street, in daylight. It is the picture a visitor will compare against what they see when they arrive.
One next step, not seven
A first screen with six buttons is a first screen with no next step. Pick one: plan a visit, ask for prayer, or start a Bible study. The one you pick should be the one you are actually ready to answer within a day.
If nobody in your church has agreed to answer prayer requests this month, do not make prayer the main button. An unanswered request does more damage than no button at all.