Church website audit: a checklist you can run in one afternoon

Most churches never audit their website. They launch it, update the service times when someone complains, and hope it's doing its job. If you're reading this, you've probably started to wonder whether yours is. A church website audit sounds technical, but the version that matters takes one afternoon, your phone, and the mind of someone who has never been to your church.

Before I write to any pastor about their site, I do exactly this. I open it on my phone, I look for the things a guest needs, and I run it through the free health check we built. I've done it for a lot of churches across New England, and the same handful of gaps come up again and again. None of them are about how pretty the site is.

Here is the checklist I use, in the order I use it.

Start with the phone in your hand

Do the whole audit on a phone first. Across six church websites we manage, phones brought in 57% of all visits over 90 days, and on one site it was 68%. The desktop version is the one your staff sees every day. The phone version is the one your guests see.

Hand your phone to someone who doesn't attend your church, a neighbor or a friend from work, and give them three tasks: find the Sunday service time, find the address, and find out what to do with their kids. Then stay quiet and watch. If they pinch to zoom, scroll sideways, tap the wrong link because the buttons are tiny, or give up and ask you, you've found your first fixes.

Check two small things while you're there. Your phone number should start a call when someone taps it, and your address should open a map. They take minutes to fix, and they're two of the things a guest is most likely to tap.

Can a first-time guest find what they came for?

A guest comes to your site with a short list of questions. When is it, where is it, what's it like, and what about my kids. Your audit is simply asking whether the site answers those four without a hunt.

Look at your home page. Are the service times and address visible without tapping into a menu? Is there one clear next step, like Plan a Visit, or a wall of equal buttons competing for attention? If you want a model, Calvary Christian Church in Lynnfield puts "I'm New" right on the home page, and Cornerstone Church in Cheshire puts its service times and address right under the opening photo. Both are sites we built, and neither one makes a guest search.

Then open the page a nervous guest would read most closely, usually Plan a Visit or What to Expect. Does it say where to park, what people wear, how long the service runs, and exactly what happens with children? I wrote a whole post on what a plan a visit page needs if yours is thin or missing.

Last, check for anything stale. An Easter banner in July, a calendar full of past events, or a "latest sermon" from last spring tells a guest nobody is home. Fresh beats fancy every time.

Will Google send people to you?

Search for your church by name, then search "church near me" from your neighborhood. Two questions matter here.

First, what shows in the results? If your home page title reads "Home" or "Welcome," Google has nothing to work with. Each page should have its own title with your church name and town in it, and a one or two sentence description that sounds like a person wrote it.

Second, look at the box on the right side or the map listing. That's your Google Business Profile, and for a lot of people it's the first thing they see, even before your website. Are the hours right? Is the website link correct? Are there recent photos? If you've never claimed it, start there. My step by step Google Business Profile guide walks through it in about an hour.

While you're at it, compare your church's name, address and phone number on your website, your Google listing and your Facebook page. They should match exactly. Small differences make Google less sure which listing is really you.

Is it fast enough?

Go to Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool, paste in your address, and read the mobile results. Don't panic about the big number at the top. Look at how long it takes for the main content to show up. Google's own guidance calls 2.5 seconds or less a good experience.

On church sites, the usual cause of a slow page is the same: photos uploaded straight off a camera or phone, sometimes several megabytes each. Resizing and compressing them is often the biggest single speed win you can get without touching anything else. Too many plugins on an older WordPress site is the other common cause.

Is it safe, working and easy for everyone?

These checks are quick, and they get skipped the most.

Look at your browser's address bar. Your site should load with https and no warning. A "not secure" message is enough to make a careful guest close the tab.

Click through your menu and footer. Every link should go somewhere real. Broken links usually point to an old giving page, a retired calendar, or a PDF someone deleted years ago.

Then think about the people in your congregation who don't see well or use a screen reader. Is the text large enough and dark enough against its background? Do your photos have descriptions? Is your service time written as text, or only inside a graphic? A graphic can't be read aloud, can't be found by Google, and can't be copied into a calendar.

What to fix first

When you're done, you'll have a list. Here's the order I'd work through it:

1. Anything that stops a guest cold: wrong service times, a dead Plan a Visit link, a "not secure" warning, or a phone number that can't be tapped.
2. The four guest questions on the home page: time, place, what it's like, and kids.
3. Your Google Business Profile and the page titles Google shows.
4. Photo sizes and anything else making the site slow on a phone.
5. Broken links, stale content, and readability for everyone.

The first two are usually an afternoon for whoever updates your site. The rest can be spread over a few weeks.

One honest note about scores. Any audit tool, including ours, measures the things it knows how to measure. The two church sites I mentioned above score 93 and 88 on our health check, not 100, and that's fine. A score is a starting point for a conversation, not a grade on your ministry. What matters is whether a guest can find you, trust you and show up on Sunday.

Run the church website audit in a minute

If you'd rather not do every step by hand, run your site through our free church website health check. It covers the same ground as this post across eight areas, from guest experience and Google to speed, phones, accessibility, links and security. It takes about a minute, you don't need an account, and it tells you in plain words what's worth fixing first.

I built White Oak because I believe a church website is part of how people find their way to Jesus, and I want yours doing that well. If the report raises questions, call me at (860) 854-4983. I'm happy to walk through it with you.