What Does A Church Website REALLY Cost?
“If you want something that becomes a tool to attract people to your church, you can still do it for free, but I would not recommend it. Free comes with its own set of costs.” - CLeaders
Our church website costs about $100 a year… and that includes our two domain names. The site is beautiful, up to date (Drupal 8), and we own 100% of the content. I built it and maintain it, and also maintain the OS and all the software on the Linux (Ubuntu) server it lives on. The server itself is leased (Linode) for very little cost. … is it a lot of work? Sometimes. We’ll soon need to upgrade the server to a newer Ubuntu, and SSL adds a layer of complexity we didn’t have to mess with in the past (but we don’t pay $ for that either). We’ll need to get that working. The trade off is, more work = less cost. Like so many things.
It’s really not all that difficult to learn the tech involved if you a) are determined to learn it, and b) aren’t afraid of tech in general… and c) have a lot of patience with the learning process. Learning Greek and Hebrew (what little I did learn) was much harder.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
My church just hired a new staff person who is starting his ministry today. He is our Director of Children and Social Media Ministries. We are figuring about 75 percent of his time is to be spent on children’s ministry and 25 percent on things like maintaining the church website and administering the church’s Facebook page and developing whatever other social media we want the church to be involved in. He’ll likely be the person who formats the church’s newsletter that we email out a few times a year.
Our church pays $ 50 per month. It’s full-featured but too expensive.
….”what would it cost not to have a church website?” My take here is that with so many people depending on social media for their contact with churches and institutions, failing to have a good social media presence, including a website, might ensure that a church will have little impact among the young and even the middle aged. (or near-old-fogeys like myself)
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
[Bert Perry]….”what would it cost not to have a church website?” My take here is that with so many people depending on social media for their contact with churches and institutions, failing to have a good social media presence, including a website, might ensure that a church will have little impact among the young and even the middle aged. (or near-old-fogeys like myself)
Agreed, 100%. Even back in 2003 when my family found and joined the church we are now in, the pastor asked how we found them, and I replied that we did an internet search for independent, fundamental (still a useful term back then), bible-believing churches, and this was one of the ones that came up. It had a great website, detailing doctrine, showing the types of ministries they were involved in, etc. Made it very easy for me to consider checking it out.
I’m certain it’s even more important today for a church to have a good online presence.
Dave Barnhart
We recently got a new website. As one of our deacons put it when we were first discussing the idea, “Not having a website is what not having a church sign used to be.” It doesn’t have to be “church marketing”. It’s making yourself accessable to the community.
Josh Stilwell, associate pastor, Alathea Baptist Church, Des Moines, Iowa.
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