Although almost all pastors use electronics at church and many use technology during their preaching, only a tiny percentage of them have a church webpage. Since millions of Christians and aspiring churchgoers check the Internet as well as their own place of worship’s webpage every day, this can be an issue.

Churchgoers can use a Church website to learn about volunteering opportunities at the church. The website can be used to communicate with their church and community and share helpful information.

You can give members of your community great ways to stay updated and involved in what is going on at your church, as well as events and programs your church is sponsoring or organizing. This can be done through the content published on your church’s website, such as blog posts, sermons, upcoming events, etc.

A church’s website can also include payment gateways for people willing to make donations. To have a website, you’ll need to have excellent website hosting. It will give you valuable resources to make your website attractive and easy to use and even keep crucial data safe.

What should a good church website host offer?

Before we begin discussing the best website hosting for churches, let’s look at what a good church website hosting should be like. A good website builder or website hosting for the church should:

  • Be User-friendly and easy to use.
  • Be Reliable.
  • Have beautiful templates and designs.
  • Be Secure.
  • Be scalable.
  • Have options of customizability.

Here are the web hosting platforms that we have shortlisted as the ‘best web hosting for churches’!

1. Wix

Wix is one of the best web hosting for churches because of its easy-to-use website builder and low prices. You don’t really need to dive into the technical bits much for a church website. Wix offers you everything you might need to set up your site in minutes.

Easy-to-use and Design

Ease-of-use has been the most prominent aspect of Wix. With its simple drag-and-drop design facility, your church website can be set up and going in seconds! Two options – Wix ADI or the Wix editor – are available with Wix.

Wix ADI models your webpage for you. This is after you answer their questions. The Wix Editor utilizes the drag-and-drop functionality, which allows you to reposition everything on the website by clicking and dragging the item.

Pricing

Wix is not expensive. You can either use the free plan that comes with advertisements and a Wix logo attached to your domain name, or you can get the priced plans. The cheapest plan is $11 a month, which will be more than enough to create a spectacular webpage for your church.

Features and Tools

Wix offers built-in tools, but you can get more from the app store if those aren’t enough for you. There are third-party site features that will help your website do better. This installation is done with a single click. These apps are like plug-ins or extensions.

Some of the features provided by Wix include:

  • Liva Chat widgets so you can answer your church visitor’s questions through your website.
  • Marketing tools to promote your church.
  • Form creation (e.g., surveys, polls, forms to gather information from the community).
  • Social media integration so people can find you easily.
  • SEO optimization tools to help your church rank higher in searches.
  • SSL certificate to encrypt and protect visitor’s data, e.g., donator’s credit card information.
  • Email Marketing to send out invitations and promotions, and much more!

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2. Square Space

Square space is a winner in terms of giving you stunning designs and templates for your websites. Use these mind-blowing and beautiful designs to give your church website a graceful and professional look. Since most people look at a church’s website before actually going into the church, Square space will help you attract people and make sure they stay on your website.

Pricing

Square Space is an economical Website builder, so it’s suitable for churches. The prices at SquareSpace start at $12 / month. We suggest the $18 per month Business plan because it allows you to receive your website’s donations. Unlimited storage and bandwidth are included in all yearly plans and free custom domain and SSL protection. When you update, you gain access to new features such as promotional pop-ups.

Easy to use

For beginners, Squarespace can be pretty easy to use. It’ll get the job done if you’re planning on creating a simple church website. Square Space uses the drag-and-drop method of website building. But it is not fully drag-and-drop. It’s more sectional, which takes a little longer to handle.

Editing is quick and easy over time, and you can enjoy the unlocked menus. The easiest way to use the Squarespace Editor is just to take a little time and patience to take full advantage of it.

Features

Square space comes with inbuilt extensions that will help you out in your church website’s optimization. You can add extra extensions from the app store. You probably won’t need these extensions for a church website, but they are still useful for promotional purposes. Apps like Printful and Quickbooks may be of some use to a church.

Square space lets you integrate social media accounts with your website. For sermons, you can even host podcasts!

If you want your church to rank higher in the search results, use the SEO tools on Square space to rank higher. Squarespace has some of the best SEO practices and tools to make your church’s website rank high and have more people access it.

Other features and tools include:

  • MailChimp and email campaigns for mailing invitations.
  • Free domain for a year if you opt for the annual plan.
  • SSL certificates to keep the donator’s information safe.
  • DDoS protection.
  • Backups and Restores.
  • Easy Event scheduling, and much more.

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3. Weebly

Weebly is popular because of its affordability and ease to use. It’s one of the best web hosting for churches as it gets the job done quickly at a low price. Since church websites are mainly used to dispatch information, Weebly is the perfect candidate for it.

Ease of Use in Design

Weebly is ideal if you want a simplistic, attractive design and more innovative guidance. All the templates are really organized. You can’t drag anything anywhere you like. You have limited customizability but extremely easy to use.

Weebly is a web-building site with a drag-and-drop designing ability that lets you create your website easily. You can drag actual photos, text boxes, icons, and more around your site rather than going into complicated methods.

Affordable Pricing

You can pick between free or paid plans. The paid plans are not expensive (from $6-$26). While the free plan sounds tempting, it comes with advertisements and doesn’t give you a custom domain. If you want your church website to look professional, we recommend the paid plans.

Features

Weebly offers scalable features. Meaning that you can start with limited features and resources. But if traffic to your church website grows, you can expand the website.

Weebly has a wide variety of apps that you can buy or get free with your subscription. Some of the applications and features that might aid your church website are as follows:

  • Tools to increase traffic on your church website and have more people visit it.
  • Social media integration.
  • Pricing tables.
  • Chat through Facebook messenger to talk to visitors directly and answer queries regarding your church.
  • Tabs app, which helps to display content in the form of tabs.
  • One-click installation of all apps.
  • SEO optimization tools to get more people to visit your site by making it rank higher in search results. (e.g. SEO HTML formatting and meta descriptions)
  • Customization of URLs.
  • Email marketing or newsletter tool to easily send out church invitations or news regarding upcoming events to subscribers. (plus reports to see who opened your website)
  • DDoS protection and SSL certificates to protect data.

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4. ShareFaith

As the name suggests, Sharefaith is a website builder that was specifically built to help churches worldwide build websites easily without the need for coding and technical hassles. All its features are directed towards churches.

With all of its specifications, ShareFaith is a powerful church website hosting and website builder. They have whatever you need to develop and run a vibrant church website. They have a simple and easy-to-use design-builder and features that can enhance and highlight church activities and events. Apart from this, they offer vibrant but flexible models.

Church centered design and features

Sharefaith is one of the best web hosting for churches because its features cater to church websites’ needs. For example, they have downloadable video sermons, a calendar for important events, and even a podcast feature for recording sermons!

Also, the designs at ShareFaith are not boring and medieval. Instead, they give you modern and stunning design templates that add a cool look to your website. But if you don’t like the templates, you can always customize them according to your church’s needs. These templates are responsive to both PCs and phones.

Easy-to-Use

The editor has a simple drag-and-drop designing facility that helps you organize the data on your website. It gives you a preview of what the website should look like. Anyone can use ShareFaith and create a stunning Website for their church since it’s so convenient and straightforward.

Pricing

The cost of Sharefaith is a disadvantage. To create a website, you’ll need the $45 per month “Internet + Media” kit that is billed annually. This kit includes free hosting, template swapping, and a forum for charitable giving and donations. Other web hosting platforms can achieve all this for lower prices.

Easy Donations

With its in-house network, ShareFaith makes accepting donations much smoother. It can be incorporated onto your homepage with a simple URL, QR code, or donate icon. Each transaction is safe and protected because this service is entirely PCI compliant. You can even integrate payment methods into your social media accounts or church app.

Comprehensive Support

Sharefaith offers spectacular comprehensive support to all its subscribers. They have articles and information related to the following areas in their comprehensive support:

  • Worship Media.
  • ShareFaithKids.
  • Donations.
  • Account billing.
  • Mobile church applications etc.

You may also submit a service ticket or make a phone appointment. If you have a paid plan, you will have access to premium phone service and will have reduced wait times while calling their support team.

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5. Ministry Designs

Last on the list of the best web hosting for churches is Ministry Designs. Like Sharefaith, Ministry designs also offer services catered to the needs of church websites. You will get all the tools and features that will help you spread the word of God and Jesus to Christians through your website.

Gorgeous Templates

Ministry designs allow you to create a beautiful website with their gorgeous design templates. You can easily pick from the templates and design a stunning website and manage it as well.

Ministry Success Representative

For those of you with no website-building experience, ministry designs won’t let you struggle. There are lots of training programs available. And a ministry success representative will share his/her screen with you to guide you through the whole process of setting up your website.

The phone call and screen sharing will answer all your queries and conveniently let you build your website from scratch. If you still have problems after setting up your website, then Ministry designs offer you all the support you could ask for.

Features for churches

As ministry design is a church-oriented website building platform, you get features intended explicitly for churches like sermons uploading, calendar, email list management, etc. You even get tools that will help you grow your church and attract more visitors to your church’s website.

Pricing

Ministry success is rather expensive. You have to pay $1000 upfront and then be billed $20 every month. But if you’re looking for the best web hosting for churches, then Ministry designs might be one of your best options.

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Conclusion

All the five website hosting platforms and website builders are excellent for building your church’s website and growing your audience. With all the features, you’ll be able to spread the word of Jesus to a large group of people and keep the community updated about upcoming events. Also, collecting donations will get so much easier! So pick from our list of the best web hosting for churches and keep the faith alive!