REACHRIGHT Podcast

A little over a year ago, we stated that the communications director became the second most important job in every church. 

Despite the pushback, we stand by that statement.  

In the era of online interaction, clear and consistent communication is more critical than it has ever been before. 

Your church should consider adding a communications director to your team if you haven’t already. 

In this episode, we will tell you why. 

Table of contents

• Help To Create Your Church Statements
• Keep your communication concise.
• Post on Social Channels Consistently.
• Build Your Assimilation Communication Process
• Handle A Weekly Newsletter
• Take Care of Local SEO
• Manage Your Church Website Content
• Help to Create Video Content

Your church needs to have clear mission, vision, and core value statements. In our experience, for most churches, these are a work in progress. 

A good communications director can help you clarify these statements and help them become a part of the way people talk about your church. 

Remember, these statements have no value if no one ever uses them. 

Every organization struggles with staying on message. Churches are no differnt. 

There are some things you need to say repeatedly as a church, even when you are tired of saying them. 

It helps to remember that people in our congregation don’t remember everything they hear from you, even if we wish they did. 

When you start to feel tired of saying the same thing, that’s a sign that you might be saying it just enough. 

Social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter need regular updating, and many church leaders find that task daunting. 

A communications director can help you post to your social profiles regularly and take that load off you. 

For Facebook, your goal should be to post daily. Instagram needs a few posts a week, and on Twitter, you can post as often as five times daily. That’s a lot to keep up with!

Every church needs to have a straightforward process for how you help visitors become fully committed members. 

That process centers around a communication strategy. 

An automated and consistent series of emails, texts, and physical mail is usually the best process. 

A communications person can help you craft the exact right message for each of these points of contact. 

Regular and consistent communication with members is an integral part of church life. 

But for many, the weekly newsletter is just an afterthought. It is an email version of the announcements you gave on Sunday morning. 

Your newsletter is one of the most valuable tools in your arsenal. A communications person can help you craft a weekly email that engages more people and enables more people to take a step towards becoming more like Jesus. 

A good communications person should help you tackle Local search engine optimization. You want your church to show up when people look for you in an online search. 

By getting your church listed on all the relevant directories, your communications person can ensure your info is accurate on dozens of local guides. In most cases, a service is the best way to handle this, but a communications person should run point. 

Your website is now the front door for your church. The good news is that most websites are super easy to update for anyone with a sliver of technical know-how. 

Most people don’t know that the most challenging part of building a website is figuring out what you want to say and how to say it. 

A good communications director can help you create great website content and keep your content updated. 

For most visitors, their first experience with you will be on your website, so getting this right is vital. 

Video is becoming more and more important for churches. This is true for both sermons and other types of content. 

Welcome videos, announcement videos, and theology explanations are examples of videos in which we see churches investing. 

While a communications person may not be able to film or edit these kinds of videos, they will be beneficial in making sure you get the language just right. 

• The Biggest Communication Mistakes Preachers Make
• 14 Tips For Improving Church Communications
• 14 Best Church Team Communication Tools
• Great Alternatives to Church Newsletters to Boost Engagement
• How The Internet Has Revolutionized The Way Churches Communicate

Every year at REACHRIGHT, we scour the web for the most impactful statistics that churches need to know.

In this year’s post, we highlighted 18 that stood out above the rest. 

And in today’s episode, Thomas and Ian each choose the three that will have the most significant impact on the way we do ministry in 2022. 

The church stats and data suggest in-person attendance is only 36-60% of what it was pre-COVID. This is according to The Unstuck Group. 

Rise of Bivocational Ministry

According to a Faith Communities Today survey, fewer than two-thirds (62.2 percent) of U.S. churches have a full-time pastor. 

The data points to 65% of faith members saying they have recently watched services online.

More than 50% of church giving comes directly from credit cards, according to Nonprofits Source. They also found a 32% increase in giving for those that offer online donations. 

The U.S. charitable giving statistics recorded that about 64% of all donations across the country came from women.

In a Barna Group survey, nearly 38% of pastors are considering stepping away from full-time ministry. This percentage is up from the 29% previously reported in January.

A lot has changed in the world over the past year.  

And let’s be clear, the rate of change is faster than it has ever been before. 

And the rate of change in the Church may be even more rapid. 

Every church has had to pivot over the last year to stay relevant.  

Our message must never change, but flexibility in our methods is vital. 

To that end, we came up with five church trends you need to know for 2022.

Table of contents

• Work From Home
• Working Through Online Attendance
• Attention to Mental Health
• Less Is More
• Change of Metrics
• More On Church Trends

The COVID pandemic created an enormous shift toward working at home. 

Every person with a job that could be done remotely made the pivot. 

And now, as the world gets back to normal in most places, many of us have become attached to remote work. 

Many churches are embracing this. Before the pandemic, most churches had a 9-5 in the office culture. 

Today, most of your staff prefer the flexibility to work from home, at least part-time. 

This creates challenges for churches. Productivity can be harder to measure, and building a healthy staff culture may not come as naturally. 

But there are huge benefits to working remotely. 

Your staff will likely appreciate the flexibility. Long term, many churches may be able to repurpose some office space for ministry or maybe even rental income for the church.  

In March 2020, almost every church took a hard look at their technology. People could not come to church in person, so online options became vital. 

And while most churches have reopened their doors, the reality is that physical attendance has been down dramatically across the board since that time. 

According to The Unstuck Group, in-person attendance is only 36-60% of what it was pre-COVID

The fact is that we need to have a reckoning with Online Church Attendance. 

For many churches, it was a necessary evil. Something we were willing to tolerate because there was no better alternative. 

But the generations to come will see less of a distinction between the online world and the physical world. 

While we still believe that being physically present is imperative for Christians, the value of online attendance needs to be reckoned with. 

Have you noticed that you hear more about mental health now than ever before?

There is a growing understanding that mental health plays an enormous part in human flourishing. 

And this presents an enormous opportunity for churches. 

It starts with encouraging people to take mental well-being seriously. 

Churches with the right-sized budgets can even offer mental heal resources for members and people within the community. 

But be careful. Do not assume that just because someone is a mature Christian, they are qualified to help people with their mental health challenges. 

Consider partnering with mental health professionals in your community. Build a working relationship with them, and you can bring real healing to people in need. 

Many churches discovered in the pandemic that the big production they were working toward each week did not have the intended results. 

In response, many church leaders have made a conscious choice to do less production and, in some cases, offer fewer ministries. 

Take a hard look at your church’s mission statement. 

Are there things you are doing that are not moving your church closer to that stated mission?

Don’t be afraid to cut programs that are not helping you reach your church’s goals. 

Many churches are truly finding that they can accomplish more by doing less. 

For decades the primary metrics that church leaders tracked were tied to attendance, finances, and decisions.  

And while those numbers are just as valuable today as they were in the past, there are new trends in metrics that you need to know about. 

The key is engagement. Attendance and giving can be used to measure engagement, but there are many other numbers you can look at. 

Here are some of the more popular ones that your church should consider. 

• Number of people in Small Groups
• Number of people involved in service
• Hours watched on Youtube
• Number of shares on Facebook
• Traffic on your blog posts
• Number of opens on your church emails

The list could go on and on. 

The point is that these measurements all look at the number of people engaging with your ministry. 

While we should never get our worth from our numbers, these new metrics can help your church measure the real impact you are making in your community. 

• 15 Metrics Churches Should Measure in 2020
• 7 Church Attendance Statistics That Should Drive You To Prayer
• 18 Easy Ways To Give Your Church Website Home Page A Makeover
• How to Create the Perfect Church Home Page
• Should Churches Try To Chase Social Media Trends

It’s that time of year again.  

The time when we take stock of what happened last year and start to look forward to what God is going to do in the year to come.  

And for most church leaders, that means that it’s time to take a look at our goals for the new year. 

But as most of us know, most goals and resolutions are abandoned but mid-January. 

We wanted to do an episode dedicated to Church Goal Setting to help you get some mileage out of your goals this year. 

We hope these tips help your church reach more people and grow. 

Table of contents

• Revisit Last Years Goals
• They Must Be Measurable
• Let Your Leaders Set Their Own Goals
• Make Them Qualitative
• Set Up Benchmarks
• Put them Where Others Can See Them.
• More on Church Goal Setting

If we want to get somewhere in the new year, we must know what happened last year. 

Now is the best time to take an honest assessment of how last year went. 

Ask yourself how you did on each of your goals last year. 

If you missed the mark, what caused that to happen? Will that be a problem again this year?  

Take an honest stock, and it will help you set better goals this year. 

One of the biggest mistakes we see church leaders making is creating unmeasurable goals. 

And I get it. It is hard to quantify spiritual growth. 

But you have to stretch yourself to find ways to measure what your church sets out to do.  

“I want to see a fresh hunger for prayer.” That is an excellent thought. It’s a bad goal because you can’t measure it.  

A better goal would be, “I want to see an average of 15 people in our weekly prayer meetings this year.” It is better because you can look back at this time next year and see what God has done. 

If you are like most church leaders, you have goals for areas of ministry other than your own.  

If you lead a church, I am sure you want to see growth in your Youth and Kids programs. 

But avoid the urge to create goals for areas that other people oversee. 

Instead, allow them to work with the Holy Spirit to craft their own goals for their area of ministry. 

When that doesn’t align with your goals for that ministry, it is a great chance to have an alignment conversation.  

These can be very healthy. 

Avoid the temptation to make your goals all about traditional metrics. Salvations, Attendance, and Giving are essential to track, but they are not the only areas you can follow. 

Keep in mind that qualitative goals still need to be measurable.  

Metrics like hours served in the community or the number of people who invited a friend are great examples of metrics that measure the ministry’s quality. 

IF you are serious about your goals, you need to have some benchmarks along the way.  

If one of your goals is to grow your Instagram follows to 1000 in the new year, plan to revisit these goals quarterly at a minimum.  

Are you making the progress you expected?  

Don’t be afraid to adjust your goals if you need to. Remember, they are there to serve you, not the other way around. 

Finally, goals are best if they are shared publically. This may not make sense for every metric, but most should be displayed publically where other members of your team can see them. 

This will help you to keep your goals in mind.  

It also provides accountability along the way.  

We could all use some of that!

• How Setting Practical Goals Helps Your Church Grow
• Top 7 Goals For Your Church Website
• How To Use Facebook To Expand Your Church’s Reach
• How To Align Your Team With Your Vision

Christmas Eve is one of the most attended services of the year.

For most churches, the night can be both exciting and chaotic.

And often, following up with your visitors gets lost in the shuffle. 

That’s too bad because if we miss the follow-up, the odds of us turning visitors into disciples is cut dramatically. 

But fear not. In today’s episode, we created a list of 7 tips to teach you exactly how to follow up with your Christmas Eve Visitors. 

Table of contents

• Give Them a Gift
• Thank Them In an Email
• Ask Them For Feedback
• Send A Card
• Don’ Forget The Kids
• Build An Email Sequence
• Invite Them To Something Specific
• More On This Topic

Who doesn’t love a gift? It doesn’t have to be something big or expensive.

We’ve seen churches give away chocolate bars, Stainless Tumblers, Coffee Mugs. 

I even saw one church offer to donate to another local charity in the visitor’s name.     

It’s just about making a great first impression.  

Visitors make up their minds very quickly about whether or not they will return for a second visit. 

If we give them a gift right away, it can set the tone for their whole experience. 

As soon as the service is over, make it your team’s mission to send an email to every first-time visitor. (You did get their information, right?)

IF you can send the email that night, it would be best.  

Also, it’s best to send these emails from the pastor’s email address. It’s okay to have people help you get them out, but it will make a more significant impact if it’s from the pastor. 

In that email, it can be short and sweet. You want to thank them for visiting, wish them a Merry Christmas, and ask for the next thing on our list. 

We have found that one of the best things to do in a follow-up email is to ask the visitor for feedback. 

But not just any feedback.  

You don’t want to ask them about the bad stuff. That can come later. 

Right now, you are just asking about what they noticed first about your church.  

Usually, this will help them remember a positive part of their experience. At the same time, it will help them to feel like they are being constructive and a part of the community.  

A great next step is to send a handwritten card.  

Emphasis on the handwritten. No one needs another piece of junk mail in their hands. That might turn visitors off. 

Instead, a simple card from the pastor saying how thankful you are that they came out will go a long way if you get their address. 

Once again, it’s okay to get help with this from your team. Pastors don’t always have the most legible handwriting.

If your visitors had kids, make sure to include them in your follow-up process.  

We love the idea of sending them a card of their own.  

We have seen churches get great results when they include a little surprise for the kids. Stickers work great. 

Kids love to get mail addressed to them, and this will go a long way. 

Every great follow-up process has an email sequence at its core.  

Make it your goal to send five emails in the five weeks following someone’s visit. 

Those emails are best if they come from the pastor’s email account, but you should be using a system like Mailchimp or constant contact to send them out. 

In all of your communication, make it your goal to invite your visitor to the next step.  

This can be a visitor’s lunch after church or a specific class your church is offering.  

We have seen so many different events that work. 

The main thing is that you have to be specific. Don’t make the mistake of casting out a generic invite. 

“We hope to see you next week!” Is not an invite.  

Try something more like “I’d like to personally invite you to join me at X. It’s happening on Sunday at 12:30. Do you think you can make it?”  

Be specific, and you will see the number of people you connect with skyrocket. 

• 22 Ideas for Promoting Your Church’s Christmas Eve Service This Year
• 8 Ways to Promote Your Christmas Eve Service
• 6 Things You Need To Do To Get Your Church Website Ready For Christmas
• Email Marketing For Churches – 7 Tips You Need To Know
• Seven Church Newsletter Mistakes And How To Fix Them

For most churches, Christmas Eve services are the second most attended event of the year. Only Easter Sunday sees more attendance. 

There are people in your community who never step foot in a church, except on those two days. 

If your church wants to do a better job reaching those people, you need to find ways to promote your Christmas Eve Service. 

We came up with eight ways to get you rolling. 

Table of contents

• Let People Know About it Early
• Choose A Theme
• Create A Graphic For The Event
• Build A Chrismas Eve Landing Page
• Create A Facebook Event
• Promote Your Facebook Event
• Teach People How To Invite Others
• Ask People To Let You Kow Their Coming
• More On Christmas Eve Services

The earlier you get the jump on announcing Your Christmas Eve services, the better. Make it your goal to announce the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

If you have been doing Christmas Eve Services for a while, most people will already expect it. 

But announcing your service early helps people start to mentally prepare for the fact that Christmas is right around the corner, and they will begin to make their plans around what the Church is doing. 

It is also a good habit to choose a theme. While most of your attendees will have been to a Christmas Eve service before, you have the opportunity to make things feel fresh with a new theme each year. 

Key in on one aspect of the Christmas Story, or a Christmas tradition, and let it ride. 

People are much more likely to click on an event if a graphic goes along with it. 

Don’t make the mistake of just using text. 

Tools like Canva make creating graphics for events a piece of cake. 

They even have Christmas-themed designs ready to go that you can modify and run with.

Your Christmas Eve service needs a dedicated landing page. 

This is a page on your site that is all about the event, and it needs to be full of keywords that people will search for when looking for a Christmas Eve Service. 

Make sure to talk about what people can expect at the service, how long it will last, and what you offer for children. 

These are some of the things that new visitors will need to know before they show up. 

A Facebook Event is a great way to reach people that may not know about your church. 

People will see your services when they are on the social platform and will stumble upon them in many cases. 

Make sure to link back to your landing page from the event so people can get all the details. 

It makes sense to promote your Facebook event to reach an even larger audience. You can spend as little as a dollar per day.

Facebook lets you target very specific people using their tool. 

We recommend showing your event to people within a tight radius of your church (usually 5-10 miles, depending on the area). 

Also, think about who your church is best able to reach. Do you have great Kids programs? Consider targeting young families. 

Is your church more traditional? Consider targeting people over 50. 

One of the best things you can do is start to teach the people in your church how to invite their friends and family to a Christmas Eve service. 

Most people will say yes to a personal invite. The problem is that you have some people in your church who are terrified to invite someone. 

Give people the tools and the courage to invite others, and start praying now that God would give them opportunities. 

On your landing page, it is always a good idea to ask people to respond. 

Create a form for people to let you know they are coming. 

This will let you start to follow up with them before they even show up at your church. 

In our experience, this can make your Christmas Eve visitors stickier. 

• Everything You Need To Know About Church Landing Pages
• Get Your Church Wide Events On Facebook
• 15 Affordable & Innovative Ways to Invite People to Church
• Six Church Landing Pages Your Site Needs To Include

If your church is like most, you spend a lot of time getting ready for Christmas. 

You decorate your facilities, both inside and out. 

You celebrate each Sunday leading up to Christmas. 

And your Christmas Eve services might be some of the most attended of the year. 

But there is one opportunity that very few churches take advantage of during the Holiday season. 

Most church leaders put little thought into how to get their church website ready for Christmas.

And that’s a huge mistake.  

Here are six things you need to do to make sure your website is ready this Christmas season. 

Table of contents

• Build A Landing Page
• Use The Right Key Words
• Put Your Christmas Eve Services Online
• Create Christmas Themed Content
• Choose a Primary Call To Action
• Start Making Changes Now

The first step to any seasonal change you make to your church website should be to create a landing page. This is especially true when there is an event like a Christmas Eve service. 

A landing page will give you a place to direct traffic from both internal and external sources. 

Choose a simple URL for your landing page. In most cases, yourchurch.com/christmas makes the most sense. 

Remember that as the Christmas season approaches, people conduct more online searches for Christmas-related content. 

Make sure your site uses some of those terms, especially on your landing page. 

At a minimum, you need to target keywords like “Christmas Eve Service” and “Christmas Service In _______.” 

While most people who plan to come back to church have returned, there is still a sizable group that has not. 

Covid has kept a lot of people on the sidelines. 

Online Services are a great way to reach some of those people. 

A well-done online service is also helpful for all of those in your church that travel out of town for Christmas. 

Did you know it’s okay for your church to produce content on your website that isn’t necessarily spiritual? 

There is so much content that your church can create that will help drive more traffic to your church website during the Holidays. 

A blog post about the best Christmas Light displays in your community might be helpful. 

Your staff’s favorite Christmas recipes could generate traffic. 

A list of Christmas Tree Farms in the area could be great. 

These are just a few ideas that could help generate more traffic on your site.  

As always, it is important to call people to action on your church website. This is true for your Christmas landing page as well. 

In most cases, this will be an invitation to come to a Christmas Eve service. 

Ask people to fill out a form to let you know they are coming, and use those submissions to start building a connection with people before they visit.

Finally, Don’t wait. 

You need to start making these changes right away. In general, you would like to roll out the Landing page at the beginning of December. 

Then as the month rolls on, continue to create more content. 

The great thing about the content you create is that it may get more traffic next year. 

• Everything You Need To Know About Church Landing Pages
• Six Church Landing Pages Your Site Needs To Include
• Seven Keys To An Effective Online Prayer Ministry
• Call To Action | Why Every Church Website Needs One
• 9 Calls To Action Every Church Website Needs

You spend hours each week preparing your sermon. 

Then you deliver it, and the tech team spends hours editing and getting it uploaded online. 

But it is rare for churches to put that same level of effort into making sure people watch their sermons online. 

You could be the best preacher in the world, but none of that matters if no one hears your messages.

To help you, we are discussing eight ways you can get more traffic on your online sermons. 

Table of contents

• Consider Your Titles
• Always Include Notes
• Include an Image
• Consider A Transcript
• Link related Sermons
• Use Tags and Categories
• Post to Multiple Channels
• Link Back From Social Channels

Your title plays an enormous role in how many people will listen to your sermon online. 

Try to avoid clever titles. Instead, consider using titles that someone searching for that kind of content might search for in Google. 

For instance, If you preach a sermon on Noah, You shouldn’t choose a title like “When it rains, it pours.” Instead, a title like “Noah: Growing your Faith” would get you a lot better search results. 

Too often, we see churches skip the notes when they load their sermons online. 

Remember that even the most sophisticated search engines are better at understanding the meaning of the text than understanding the context of the video. 

It’s a good idea to include the notes you use to preach on your site. 

People are much more likely to engage with your sermon content if they see a sermon or series image that goes with it. 

People may ignore a sermon title, but a graphic can help you stand out. 

Remember, you are competing for people’s attention, and an image can tip the scales in your favor. 

In addition to notes, it’s a great idea to include a transcript of your sermon in the notes. 

This gives search engines an even more clear picture of what your content is all about. 

Some churches ask volunteers to tackle this. Others will hire a transcription service to help them. Either way, transcripts can be very valuable. 

In every sermon you post onto your site, make it your goal to link to five other related sermons on a similar topic. 

You can do this at the end of the post and make it a list called: “For Further Reading.”

Even better, you can link from notes or the transcript. This will help people listening to the sermon find even more content they may be looking for. 

While we prefer WordPress, most website content management systems allow users to assign tags and categories to sermons. You can use these to help people find more related content. 

At a minimum, plan on adding tags and categories for Sermon Series, Speakers, and Topics. 

If you only post your sermon to Facebook or YouTube, you are missing a huge opportunity. 

Post your messages to every site you can think of. Use Youtube, Vimeo, and your website for starters. 

As your sermon library grows, you can find other channels that might be a good fit. 

When you post on channels like Youtube and Facebook, it is essential to have links back to your original content on your site. 

These are also great places to link to other vital content on your site, like a Plan Your Visit page or a Watch Live section. 

These are just some of the hacks we use to help churches get more visitors to their sermons. What is something that your church does?

Eighteen short months ago, most people had never heard of Zoom.  

Now it has become one of the most widely used tools to help people stay connected. 

And many churches have started using Zoom as a tool to make small groups more accessible. 

But Zoom meetings are not the same as in-person gatherings. 

Here are tips to help you host better Zoom Small Group Meetings for your church. 

Table of contents

• Lay Out The Ground Rules
• Cameras On
• Take Time For Small Talk
• Don’t Neglect Relationship
• Lay Out an Agenda With Timeframes
• Encourage everyone to chime in
• Consider Breakout Rooms
• Pray

Before anyone in your small group meets, it’s essential to have a conversation about expectations. 

This conversation lays out how often you will meet, what you will do to prepare for the meeting, and who will be in the sessions. 

It is best to acknowledge some of the challenges of Zoom meetings before your first meeting. Point out the differences from in-person, and people will be more willing to stick to the ground rules you lay out. 

One of those ground rules should be that your camera needs to be on unless it’s an absolute emergency. 

As a rule, you should only turn your camera off for things that would make you leave the room for an in-person meeting. 

Having the camera on makes sure that everyone is engaging and will help you build a better connection. 

One of the things that is often missed in Zoom meetings is the little conversations. Small talk, in the beginning, is a great way to get around that. 

Zoom meetings can feel too formal if you are not careful. 

If your group is less than 15 people, you can usually get away with people talking together about actual events happening in their lives. 

Beyond the small talk, it is vital to build relationships in Zoom small groups intentionally. 

Leaders need to remember that while they may know everyone in the group, some in the group may not know each other as well. 

Take the time to share names, hometowns, family stories, interests. It helps to always start meetings with an ice breaker to help people get more connected. 

When we are in the comfort of our homes, there are many more distractions than when we meet in person. 

This makes it vital that you lay out a plan and times a the start of the meeting. 

Knowing how long a segment of the meeting will go on often helps us stay focused because the end is in sight. 

In any small group, people will have different levels of comfort when it comes to speaking out. 

This is no different from in-person meetings. 

The only difference is that the people who have an easy time talking in person can be the very people who clam up online. 

Group leaders should be prepared to ask everyone for their input. Not everyone has to answer every question. But in every meeting, each person needs to have a chance to share. 

Zoom allows for users to go into breakout rooms. This is a valuable tool for church meetings. 

A group of 10 people online does not function the same way as a group of 10 people in-person. 

In most cases, when the discussion is getting deep, a group of 3-4 people would be more effective. 

Don’t be afraid to use the breakout rooms feature in Zoom. 

Finally, your small group must pray.

Many people worry that praying over Zoom can be awkward. Help your leaders get over that. 

Your group needs to pray together. It should be a hard and fast rule for every small group meeting. 

Does your church offer Zoom small group meetings? What tips do you have for the rest of us? Let us know in the comments below.  

• The Best Time For Holding Team Meetings
• How To Harness The Power Of Facebook Groups
• Want To Reach The Unchurched? Talk, Don’t Preach
• Five Rules For Churches Moving To Remote Work

It’s no secret that we believe WordPress is the best website platform for churches. 

And one of the reasons it’s our first choice is because of the flexibility offered by WordPress plugins for churches. 

But not all plugins are created equal. 

Here’s our list of the top eight plugins that every church website needs to include. 

The Best WordPress Plugins For Churches

• Yoast
• Facebook for WordPress
• Sermon Manager
• The Events Calendar
• Akismet
• Gravity Forms
• MonsterInsights
• Smush
• More on WordPress Plugins For Churches

First on our list is Yoast. Simply put, Yoast is the best SEO tool, not only for WordPress but for any website platform. 

It used to be that doing search engine optimization took a lot of technical skill, but Yoast makes it easy. 

It handles both global SEO on your site and granular optimization on individual pages and sermons. 

Each post uses a simple red, orange, and green light system to help you see where your content needs work to make it ready for the web. 

The chances are that your church is on Facebook. (You are on Facebook, right?)

The Facebook for WordPress plugin helps you pull data from your site and enables you to make improvements to your Facebook content. This is especially useful for ads. 

This is done through a Facebook pixel. A pixel is a tool that communicates what happens on your website back to Facebook. 

If your church is running ads for an event on Facebook, you can use the pixel to let Facebook know who is signing up for the event. Facebook can then take that info and show your event to more people like those who have already signed up. 

This piece of code can 10x your advertising results on Facebook and Instagram.

Every church website needs a way to handle sermons, and we think the best way is with Sermon Manager by WP for Church. 

The plugin makes adding both audio and video sermons to your site a breeze. 

Best of all, it lets you easily categorize sermons by topic, preacher, book of the bible, and series, so every sermon you load up is easy to find for years to come. 

Our favorite tool for church events is The Events Calendar, and the free version is enough to meet the needs of most churches. 

With this plugin, creating and managing one-time and recurring events is a piece of cake. 

Each event has space for an event image which makes them very social media-friendly. 

Everyone hates spam. As your church website grows and sees more visitors, you will naturally see more and more spam. 

Akismet has you covered. It is hands down the best spam filter you can use and that makes it one of the most important WordPress plugins for churches.

For the REACHRIGHT site, Akismet has blocked 27,118 spam messages without our team ever having to see them. And that’s just in the last six months. Dealing with spam takes time, and they estimate that saved us 15 days of work!

Every week we seem to come back to the importance of calling people to action on your website. The best way to do that in most cases is through a form. 

The best form system you can use is Gravity Forms. 

This plugin lets you add unlimited forms to your WordPress website. You can do just about anything with those forms, and they will help people in your church take their next right step. 

It’s been said that in church, you get what you measure. 

MonsterInsights is the best tool for measuring what’s happening on your website. 

The plugin helps you by connecting your WordPress website with Google Analytics. It then takes that info from Google Analytics and breaks it down into easy-to-understand charts and lists. 

If you want to see your web presence improve, you must learn from what you have done in the past. 

Finally, we have Smush. This plugin takes images you load into WordPress and shrinks them to make them more web-friendly. 

Your website should be full of images, and optimizing each picture you load onto the site can take a long time. 

With Smush, you no longer need to worry about image sizes. The plugin does it all for you. 

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