Front door, side doors: build your church homepage for guests

Most church homepages weren't designed. They accumulated. A new ministry needed a link, the app got a banner, someone asked for a bigger giving button, and years later the homepage is a bulletin board for people who already attend. Each addition made sense on its own. Together they leave a first-time guest with nowhere obvious to start.

Before anyone opens a design file, decide what the homepage is for.

Pick one audience and one goal, and say it out loud

A homepage can't be everything to everybody. Name one primary audience and one primary action, and write them down as a sentence your staff can repeat.

For most churches that sentence sounds something like: "The homepage is for someone who has never been here, and its job is to get them to visit on a Sunday." Think of it as a house. Guests come in the front door. Members are family, and family knows the side door and the garage.

Saying this early gives your team permission to move member content off the homepage without guilt. Without it, every request for homepage space becomes a negotiation about whose ministry matters more.

The trade-off is real: members will click more. That's usually fine. The "three clicks" rule is a guideline, not a law, and the people who give up after an extra click tend to be the least committed visitors, not your regulars. And test your assumptions about what members come to the site for. At one large church, the data suggested regulars watched sermons on YouTube, not on the website.

Guests aren't always the answer. A church whose growth comes almost entirely through personal invitation might build the homepage for members and send guests to a dedicated "New here?" page. That's a legitimate choice. What doesn't work is refusing to choose.

Give members a side door

Members aren't less important. They're more experienced. They want to give, register a child for camp or catch up on last week's study, and they need those things one tap away, not explained. Build them a side door:

• A short "quick links" menu or utility bar in the header with the five or six tasks regulars do every week.
• The same links repeated in the footer.
• Clear links to wherever they already go, like your app or your YouTube channel.

Keep it small. If it grows into a second homepage, you've lost the point.

The homepage tells the story, the visit page handles logistics

With the audience settled, structure gets simpler. Craig Van Korlaar, our UX lead, puts it this way: "Every homepage I design, the homepage needs to tell the full story and have off ramps to more."

In practice, that means a series of short summary sections in priority order: who you are, what Sunday is like, what's there for kids, how people get connected. Each ends with a link to a fuller page. The homepage should mirror your main navigation, so someone who scrolls and someone who opens the menu find the same paths. People stop scrolling once something catches their eye, so order matters. The goal, Craig says, is "that if someone stops at any particular point, we know that they've scanned past the most important information up until that point."

Detailed logistics belong on a dedicated visit or Sunday page. On one project, we moved the service-time and parking cards off the homepage because they crowded out its real job: helping a guest decide whether this feels like a place they'd belong. Service times stayed, but the explanations (which service is traditional, when kids' classes meet, where to park) moved to the Sunday page, with several paths leading there.

The same goes for live streams. Regulars mostly watch on YouTube or Facebook, so the people watching on your website are largely prospects, and a big site-wide "Watch live" bar quietly tells them they don't need to come. Make the stream easy to find on the Sunday page and keep it modest elsewhere.

Add a second front door for people who don't know you yet

On a recent project outside the church world, a small professional firm came to discovery already sure they needed two front doors. Their homepage was for people who already knew them: a place to find the phone number or sign in, and to see what else they could help with. A separate landing page was for people who had never heard of them and were searching for one specific service. Different messages and calls to action, same look.

Churches have the same split. Not everyone who needs your church starts by searching for a church. Some search for help with a marriage, for grief support after a loss, for a recovery group, for a Christmas Eve service near them, or for a preschool. We've seen a large church's simple pages for specific crises, like the loss of a child, grow into an online ministry nobody planned, because members shared them with hurting friends.

A good landing page for a cold searcher:

• Answers the question they searched for on the page itself.
• Offers one clear next step, such as a contact person, a group, or a service to attend.
• Makes it obvious there's a church behind it, with a visible path back to the main site. Visitors arriving from Google don't know where they are.

Start with the entrances people already use: your analytics show which pages bring in visitors from search. Make those work for a first-time visitor before building new ones. Point ads, invite cards and your Google Business Profile at the landing page that matches the person you're trying to reach, not at the homepage.

Getting staff to agree on the homepage's job

Agreement comes easier before design than over a mockup. A few things help:

• Get the job sentence approved by senior leadership first. It becomes the filter for every later request.
• Look at what people actually use. On one project, a page audit showed registration was the most-visited page on the site and no kids or student pages made the top 50. Families were going straight to the task.
• Name the trade-offs openly. "Members will click once more to reach X" is easier to accept stated up front than discovered after launch.
• Make sure "not on the homepage" doesn't mean "invisible." Give each ministry a solid hub page, and let events show up automatically on the pages where they belong.

What to do when everyone wants homepage space

Some ministry will still want a spot, often with a good case. Set a policy instead of deciding one request at a time. A pattern that has worked for us is a "featured" flag that only a few people can set, so homepage features are chosen church-wide items and no single ministry can add its own. We cover featured-event policy in a separate article.

If your homepage has become a bulletin board and you're not sure where to start, we're glad to take a look. Our free website review is a good place to begin that conversation.