You never get a second chance at a first impression. And so many things impact that first impression. How good does your church’s website look on a mobile phone? More than 50% of sites now are viewed on phones. How fast is your site? Your choice of hosting of the site and perhaps of video on that site can affect site rendering speed. People typically abandon sites if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds.
Today, over 40% of all websites run on WordPress representing over 400 million sites. Faith Teams’ site also uses WordPress. Other popular website platforms include:
– Squarespace with approximately 5 million sites
– Wix with around 8 million sites
– Drupal with 450 thousand sites
– Joomla with 1 million sites
By far the most popular with churches is WordPress. WordPress is supported and provided by many hosting providers (standard and premium) and can count over 30,000 themes and 70,000 plugins to help you build just the perfect site for your church and its members and guests.
With 30,000 themes, which ones are the best to get going with? A WordPress theme is a collection of templates, graphics and core files that modify the way a WordPress website is displayed without modifying the core WordPress code (which can be modified). Some WordPress themes are bundled with a page builder that can provide quick creation and editing.
Top WordPress Themes for Churches
We’ve handpicked themes that we ourselves use and have used (and recommend to our church customers) that we think are worth consideration. These will give you the ease of implementation and flexibility that any church needs. Here are the key items we looked at:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A theme should follow best SEO practices so your website will ranks higher in search results.
- Speed. Themes should be designed to be fast so as to give a great first impression.
- Support. While themes should be intuitive, there are times help is needed. Not only should a theme be backed by great documentation and a knowledge base, it should also provide email support with fast turnaround.
- Page Builder Support. WordPress is great out of box but becomes very user friendly with support for page builders. Page builders are easy to use, and often have drag and drop functionality and predesigned templates, layouts, and design elements. Page builders also typically let you preview the appearance of a page as you edit it.
- Mobile Responsiveness. More than 50% of visitors to web sites are on a phone. Great themes support responsiveness allowing a page to be visible on a phone in a nice way without requiring the site developer to do anything special.
- Out of Box Church Templates. A great theme has templates for sites. And a really great theme already has complete church and/or non-profit templates ready to use.
Impreza
Impreza by Upsolution is a responsive template that provides almost everything you will need to create a modern and impressive site. Key features include
- Over 50 templates (including a church template) WPBakery Page Builder, one of the best on the market
- A live builder tool
- Over 7,800 icons included
- Supports the most popular plugins
Impreza is $59 and includes six months of support. Faith Teams uses this theme has first hand experience with their support. It’s great!
Elementor
Elementor can be viewed as a page builder and a theme, all in one. They even provide hosting so you can sign up and get going right away. Elementor’s interface is drag and drop and supports all the elements you would want in your website. Elementor also provides hundreds of out of box website kits. None appear to be church specific. However, there are other themes (child themes) that use the Elementor page builder to help you accelerate getting a site live.
Elementor offered as a hosted option runs between $2.99 and $19.99 per month. And the page builder by itself is between $59 and $99 per year.
Divi
Divi too is both a page builder and a theme. As well, it’s key differentiator is its drag and drop capabilities. Divi offers on top of their theme, over 300 “layouts” including church layouts and layout packs.
Divi is also priced annually at either $89 or $277 for a pro edition that adds storage and AI support.
Astra
Astra is the most popular WordPress theme ever. It’s fast, easy to use and works well with page builders such as Divi and WPBakery. It also provides over 250 prebuilt website templates including one for a church. However, it’s flexibility also means the website builder has to know how to get around WordPress. And their support is not as good as other theme providers.
Astra is very affordable. $49 for the core theme and $79 with Elementor (see above) bundled.
Avada
Avada powers close to 1 million sites and boasts non-reliance on outside helper apps like page builders, advanced menu creators and a forms engine. It also provides over 100 website templates including a church site. They also provide updates for life.
Avada is $69 and comes with 6 months of support that can be renewed on a regular basis.
WordPress, Squarespace and Wix are all good choices for your church website. WordPress though provides you with the most choices in themes, plugins and templates, the most choices in hosting and the most flexibility in building something unique. And Impreza is a great way to get there quickly.
