What a First-Time Visitor Sees

Eighty percent of people check a church's website before they ever walk in the door. Forty-one percent are doing it on a phone.

Most pastors know their site is out of date. Almost nobody knows exactly what a stranger sees when they open it on a Saturday night.

So we'll tell you. Send us your church's website and we'll send back a written page. Free, no pitch, nothing to buy, and we never need your login.

Here's exactly what we look at.

1. Can a stranger find you at all?

We search your church's name and your town the way a visitor would, on a phone. If you're not the first result, we say what's in the way, and whether your Google Business Profile is the problem.

2. Are your service times readable by a machine?

This is the most common problem we find, and the easiest to fix. Service times live inside a graphic, or a PDF bulletin, or an image of a flyer. Google can't read any of that. Neither can a screen reader. If a visitor has to pinch and zoom to find out when you meet, many of them just won't.

3. Does your address do what a phone expects?

Tapping an address should open maps. Tapping a phone number should call. If they're plain text, a visitor has to copy them by hand, and some won't bother.

4. What's the date on your most recent sermon?

We check. If it's more than a few weeks old, a stranger doesn't think "they're behind on uploads." They think "these people might not be here anymore." Same for an events calendar with last Christmas still on it.

5. Is there anything for a first-timer?

Most small-church sites are organized around what the church already knows: ministry names, staff bios, the denominational link. A visitor wants three things, in this order: when and where you meet, what happens when they walk in, and whether the church is alive. We'll tell you how fast your site answers those.

6. Does it work on a phone at all?

Text you have to zoom to read. A menu that doesn't open. A slider that covers the service times. The church office computer is the one place nobody notices any of this.

7. Who can change it?

Not a technical question. If the only person who can update the site moved away in 2023, that's the real finding, and everything else is temporary.

What you get

One written page, in plain language: what a visitor sees, what's broken, ranked by what matters, and the one thing we'd fix first. Most of what we suggest you can do yourself, on the site you already have. If a fix is worth paying somebody for, we'll say that too, even when that somebody isn't us.

Send your church's website to info@holdfast.church, or comment on any of our posts this week. We're doing 25 of these.

One more thing: nominations are open until Oct 11

For Pastor Appreciation Month we're giving small churches a website and app free through 2036. Nominate a church under 250 people — yours counts — by Sunday, October 11, which is Pastor Appreciation Day. We'll announce on the 13th.

Every church nominated gets a Front Door Audit whether they win or not. That's the whole point.