Most churches with websites don’t have an entire web development team on deck to help maintain their site. It’s often a volunteer or staff member responsible for keeping content up to date, and without an appropriate background, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to do so.

However, there are simple steps that whoever is maintaining their church’s website can take to ensure that their site is doing what it needs to do:

Conduct Regular Content Audits

Effective websites have content that is current and relevant, so it’s important that you regularly check to make sure that the content on your church website reflects what is actually going on at your church. This means going through each page and making sure nothing is outdated. You can conduct this audit on a monthly or even quarterly basis, though there are specific sections of your church website that will need more frequent updates, such as blogs and events.

Maintain a Blog

We’ve already written about the virtues of maintaining a blog on your church website and how to do so effectively. It’s important that if your church chooses to have a blog on its site, that it’s updated with content regularly. We recommend updating your blog at least weekly if not twice a week if possible. This isn’t to say that whoever is maintaining your church website as a whole is also responsible for writing every blog, but it’s important to understand how your site’s blog works and work with staff members and volunteers to get fresh content for it.

Update Your Church Events

Both current and prospective members of your congregation want to know what’s going on at your church, which is why one of the most important things for you to maintain on your church website is an updated list of upcoming events. Make sure it’s clear what the event is, where it’s being held, what time it’s being held and any other important details.

Keep SEO in Mind

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important in today’s digital climate. SEO is a strategic approach that enhances a website’s visibility on search engines like Google. Key elements of SEO include creating high-quality and relevant content, researching and implementing keywords and building backlinks.

If that sounds complicated, a basic first step you can take is using a tool like Google Keyword Planner to see what keywords or phrases people are searching for online related to churches, then making sure those keywords appear on your church website as you make content updates or publish blogs. That way, when people search for those keywords, your site shows up.

Building backlinks is also important. A backlink is simply a link from one website to another. Backlinks are crucial in SEO as they tell search engines that your church website is a valuable source of information because you’re linked from another credible source.

Some ways to build backlinks to your church website are to make sure your content is consistently updated and relevant and to reach out to other websites where you think your content might be relevant to link to. These sites could be:

• local chambers of commerce
• volunteermatch.com or local volunteer sites
• UCC Conference and National Setting church directories

You can also do research into Christian and church blogs that may have similar content to yours that could benefit from linking to your ideas as supplemental content.

Though this isn’t an exhaustive list of everything you can do to maintain your church website, it’s a good starting point to make sure key areas of your site are doing what they need to do to make your site as effective as possible.

The UCC Everywhere (UCCE) program is a state of the art website builder for United Church of Christ churches. The platform includes easy-to-update blogs, event listings and opportunities to enhance SEO. For a monthly or annual subscription fee, UCC churches get their own site along with other digital marketing tools and support to make sure their message is reaching faith-seekers in their community via the appropriate virtual channels.