6 Best website builders for church 2023
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Miglė Šeikytė
Content Lead
Recent years have shown that physical presence is not enough. Everyone should have a solid online foundation, no matter what happens. This is especially crucial for churches that glue communities together. They provide a safe space for those looking for ones, and therefore, it’s important to accommodate such needs by opening more possibilities to access church.
Therefore, churches all across the US and the rest of the globe can use a website builder and open up more possibilities for people to access the church whenever the need arises.
Majority of website builders are high-quality providers that can help you build a sympathetic site and bring your vision to life. Continue reading and find the best church website builder in terms of designs, capabilities, and price.
6 Best church website builders 2023: ranked
These are the best church website builder options:
- SITE123 – best overall church website builder
- Wix – great website builder for churches
- GoDaddy Website Builder – builder with excellent marketing features
- Squarespace – excellent website templates for churches
- Weebly – a builder with donation and eCommerce features
- ShareFaith – a church-focused website builder
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Best church website builders – our detailed list:
To help you find the best website builder for your church community, we’ve tested multiple different website builder providers to give an extensive overview of usability, features, and pricing. Below, you’ll find detailed descriptions of the website builders that we’ve picked.
1. SITE123 for churches – the best website builder for church
| Starts from: | $11.88/month |
| Features: | Simple block builder |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Best for: | Ease of use |
| Current deal: | 🔥SITE123 coupon 40% OFF!🔥 |
Have no time (or skill?) to build a bespoke church website yourself? Intuitive powerful interfaces interest you much less than the final result – a beautiful, fully functional site? If we caught you nodding, then know this – SITE123 is made to be a website builder for you.
It focuses less on customized designs. Instead, it tries to be as simple as possible. And it nails it, thanks to the unique block-building system. With that, anyone can build a massive church website: it's as simple as building it with LEGOs. Plus, you can accept donations and sell online even on its cheapest plan.
Making a church website with SITE123
Unlike most website builders, SITE123’s website building system isn’t based on templates. Instead, you combine different pre-designed blocks to form a webpage.
In the same way you don't need to be a professional builder to make a site out of colorful plastic blocks, you don't need to know anything about website design to use SITE123.
You can make a website filled with all the menus, sections, and elements you can possibly imagine in a matter of just a few minutes. This ease of use was an absolute star of the show in an extensive SITE123 review earlier.
You get started by getting a base website: SITE123 offers a bunch of variations, closest to the church being the "community" section.
Just like that, you'll already have your website set up.
And while it doesn't look like a church website...it can, and it soon will! That's because SITE123 has over 160 blocks: pre-made site sections you can mix and match together to make a website of your dreams. There are a lot of options – some of them would be very handy for a church website. Noteworthy ones include bookings, donations, events, and forums.
And, all you need to do to add one of these blocks to your website is to simply click on it.
Sure, you don’t have much freedom when it comes to editing options because the blocks are already pre-designed. But, honestly, we didn't miss the freedom all that much — especially given all the perks that come along with the block system.
Some of these blocks are made to accept donations: and you'll be happy to hear that SITE123 allows you to easily accept them, on all premium plans. So, you can quickly build a website that does that.
In case you don’t know it, let us quickly catch you up: this is a rare thing in the website building world.
The majority of website builders only allow you to sell online and accept donations with much more expensive plans. Here, a custom church website plan with pre-made blocks and donation functionality starts at $11.88/month. But if you commit to a longer term, the plan can be as cheap as $5 a month.
That's a pretty good deal – for a pretty good product.
2. Wix – affordable website builder for churches
| Starts from: | $16.00/month |
| Features: | Two website editors, top customizability |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Best for: | Making a completely unique website |
| Current deal: | 🔥Get an additional 10% OFF Premium Wix plans using code 'CyberNews10!'🔥 |
Wix is an incredibly versatile website builder, including plenty of excellent templates, editing tools, and features – and some of them will be perfect for your church website. If you have a specific vision of how you want your community's website to look and behave: this is a top-class option.
With several pre-made themes, suited specifically for churches, and options for announcements, bookings, blogging, video uploads, and more – you can make just the kind of site you want to.
Its dedication to "do things your way" can be seen immediately after signing up. The builder has two distinct page editors. There's Wix ADI, which will automatically generate a website based on your answers and Wix Editor – which lets you use extensive editing tools to edit more than 800 distinct templates.
Making a church website with Wix
Setting up a church website with Wix is simple. If using Wix ADI, the setup is as simple as telling the builder who you are, and what do you want to do.
After you're done telling the world who you are (a church!), and what do you want to do (make a website!), you'll be presented with a few pre-made options...and you're good to go!
The entire process will take you only minutes at most. Plus, there’s absolutely no need for prior design knowledge or website building skills.
And the end result is pretty good — especially if you’re just looking to create a simple website for your church. For instance, a blog or an online notice board for your congregation.
But, if you really want to make a website that reflects your community, we’d recommend going with Wix Editor. Here, you’re in the driver’s seat and have far more say over the direction and style of your website.
Especially, considering that you get to choose from a big handful of themes, created specifically for churches. These are the starter websites you can get immediately: and then start editing them, to tailor the specific interests of your community.
As far as the editing goes, Wix Editor is a seriously in-depth option. There are all sorts of customization tools alongside its drag-and-drop editor.
Fair warning: you might need some time to familiarize yourself because of the sheer number of tools and features available. But as we mentioned in a Wix review, it's absolutely worth it.
In any case, the pixel-perfect item placements, full control of the colors and texts, and animations will help you to transform the basic template and make it unique to your own community.
Other church-specific features can also be accessed through Wix's massive app store. While the builder itself comes with plenty of handy built-in features and tools, there's an extensive selection of both paid and premium apps. With them, you can give your church website these features:
- Bookings
- Event management
- Contact forms
- Donation
- Social media integration
- Forum/member area for your community members
With all these extra features added to your website, it’s pretty much an all-in-one online home for your church.
Beautiful, easy to navigate, and feature-rich, we’d say that Wix has more than proven its mettle as the best website builder for churches. Prices for premium plans start at $16.00 a month – for an excellent church website, that's a great deal.
3. GoDaddy Website Builder – a simple solution with effective marketing tools
| Starts from: | $9.99/month |
| Features: | Excellent marketing tools |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Best for: | Finding new audiences, reaching out to people |
| Current deal: | 🔥Get up to 33% OFF GoDaddy website builder!🔥 |
GoDaddy Website Builder is a no-nonsense website builder that got to this list courtesy of its business-oriented features. And sure – a church isn't a business. But its excellent tools will be very helpful for reaching out to your community and measuring the success of your communication. Plus, the entire platform is really easy to navigate — making it a sought-after option amongst beginners.
If you're looking to build a church website to attract more people, get better on social media, or inform your community about future plans and events, GoDaddy is a perfect solution.
Building a church website with GoDaddy website builder
One of the main reasons for this is because the builder offers a no-fuss experience. For starters, its setup process is as simple as just picking out the category of your site.
The editor itself draws similarities from other block-based builders: you basically get to choose from various pre-made sections. There are some good options for your church, such as calendars, videos, PayPal donation button, and more.
It's all very simple. While GoDaddy Website Builder has no church templates, the block editing system makes it rather simple to convert it to what you need it to be. We covered it in the GoDaddy Website Builder review – the templates automatically adapt to your content, rather than the other way around.
But the real fun begins once you move away from basic site editing, and move on to marketing.
For that, GoDaddy offers InSight. It's a data-crunching system, that offers you specific help in order to reach your goals, and judges your attempts at reaching them.
Not only do we find Insight to be rather helpful — especially for those new to marketing — but we also appreciate that you don’t need to have any marketing knowledge beforehand. There’s nothing to it, except following the generated plan.
Email marketing and social media posting (directly from the GoDaddy dashboard) is added automatically to all GoDaddy website plans. The $9.99/month Basic plan lets you connect 1 social media platform and reach out to your community via 100 monthly emails. Meanwhile, the most expensive plan costs $16.99/month and includes eCommerce, unlimited social media posting, and up to 25,000 monthly social media posts.
Also, GoDaddy participates in the In-Kind Donation Program, which helps the non-profit organizations (churches do apply!) reach their goals by donating free tools to them, such as domain names and even free hosting or builders. So check them out – you might find something for yourself, too.
All things considered, we're big big fans of GoDaddy offering. And, if you’re short on time, but still want to be seen and heard online, GoDaddy will be right up your alley, too.
4. Squarespace – website builder with sympathetic designs
| Starts from: | $16.00/month |
| Features: | Excellent templates and business tools |
| Free version: | 14-day trial |
| Best for: | A modern church website |
| Current deal: | 🔥Get up to 30% OFF Squarespace!🔥 |
A website should be easy to read and look easy on the eye. With beautiful, modern templates, Squarespace offers just that – it's a modern solution for a modern establishment.
But it's not only the looks that it has. There's much more to this website builder than just a pretty face. The platform’s simple interface that houses all the necessary tools and features to manage a solid community website.
Making a church website with Squarespace
To start, Squarespace’s interface allows you to tackle all the complicated facets of running an online community in one place. There are barely any apps to download, and you won't need to do hours of rigorous testing and research to find the right tools. Everything is in one place.
Right from the all-in-one interface, you can change and control all of the vital things. I'm talking marketing features, design and layouts, and even sales or donations. There are even quick options for setting up restricted and member pages for more private information, concerning your community. Also, you can easily upload audio and video files – so you can upload podcasts or other informative content right into the page.
This is obviously far more convenient and organized than if the features are scattered across places. We have no doubt that it’s going to save you time and effort – so you can focus on your primary tasks instead.
Now, moving the interface aside, let's talk about the builder's design: simply put, it's modern, smart, and done absolutely right. Many website builders suffer from a "function or form" syndrome, in which good-looking websites turn into a functionality nightmare, and functional websites look like they've been made back in 2008.
This builder tackles this issue, aiming to do well in both. And while there are no church-specific templates on Squarespace, there are a lot of excellent options that you can easily, uh, convert. All of the 110+ templates are free to use, and they're genuinely really good.
For instance, the Montauk theme looks ready-made for any church to jump onto.
Or not – other options look just as good, and can help you make just the kind of website you want. Modern, minimalistic, and professional, they are everything and more that you’d expect to see in a website for a church.
In Squarespace review, we focused a lot on the looks and ease of use. For a good reason, too: Squarespace is perhaps the best in the world when it comes to that. If a lovely design is on top of your priority list, at least give Squarespace a shot.
There is a free trial you can use, and the premium Squarespace plans start at $16.00 a month – a decent price for the time it saves, and the options that it gives. But the prices can go even lower: a special deal for non-profit organizations gives an additional 10% discount. If your church qualifies, Squarespace becomes an even better deal. Overall, this is an excellent website builder for churches.
5. Weebly – excellent church website builder for donations
| Starts from: | $6.00/month |
| Features: | Simple eCommerce tools |
| Free version: | Yes |
| Best for: | Selling things and accepting donations |
| Current deal: | 🔥Get up to 33% OFF Weebly!🔥 |
A well-known name in the website-building community, Weebly was known for its excellent simple drag-and-drop website builder. Now, it's going all-in on working with mobile payments and eCommerce. If for your church website, you're looking for both of these things at once – you're onto a winner.
Taking donations on Weebly is a breeze, and it's excellent should your community decide to use the platform to accept donations, tithing, or other similar payments.
For instance, all you have to do to add a donate button is to add a new product – using Weebly's eCommerce suite.
Another popular option for churches is the Donorbox App — a third-party app found in Weebly’s App Center.
It lets your church website accept recurring donations. Here, donors can choose from a list of set — by you, of course — donation amounts or even add custom donation amounts.
Now – the website building itself. Weebly has no church-specific themes. In fact, it only has around 60 themes in total (not much!).
Having said that, the themes are simple and entirely customizable. Even changing a bit of text and adding relevant media can entirely transform them. They're simple, modern, professional, and charming.
Plus, it’s easy enough to tweak one of the offered themes into something that better reflects your church and community with Weebly’s editor. Both here, and on our Weebly review, we liked it – it was a simple drag-and-drop editor, letting you simply drag and...drop...available elements onto your site, wherever you wish them to be.
Simple? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
Wish there were more of these elements though. There isn't much pre-made, so you'll need to really get your creative juices flowing to produce something that suits a church site.
In fact, there’s something for more experienced users, too. If you’re a seasoned webmaster, you can customize a great deal more with coding since Weebly allows for full CSS/HTML control.
Premium Weebly plans, letting you connect your own domain, start at $6.00 a month. But we suggest moving one step up, and picking up a plan with no Weebly branding and features for accepting payments. They start at $12.00 a month.
6. ShareFaith – a dedicated website builder for churches
| Starts from: | $50.00/month |
| Features: | Church specific tools |
| Free version: | 15-day trial |
| Best for: | Making church-specific content |
Sometimes, you need more than just a website. Building an online presence for a church doesn't end there – and so, you might find yourself looking for experts, who offer specialized expert help for you and your community.
This is where Sharefaith comes in. It stands out from the other church website builders. That's because it’s the only builder on this list that focuses on churches only. While the features might be invaluable to a church website, beware – you'll need to be willing to compromise in terms of pricing and design.
Making a church website with Sharefaith
You get started by requesting a free demo from a Sharefaith employee: it's as simple as checking out its website builder page, picking a template, and filling in your contact details.
Then, you'll get your chance to test out the platform yourself. Sharefaith uses its own Sidekick editor for editing – to be honest, we found it to be a rather limited design-wise. While there's a lot you can do, the platform itself seems a little bit outdated.
The same story can be said about the templates, too. You can definitely tell that they're a bit on the...older side. Certainly, they're no match to the other options on this list.
And while there's nothing inherently wrong with some retro website building fun, a bit of digging around reveals the details. Sidekick editor was released in 2012 and seemingly, no facelift was done to improve it since. It shows.
But what it lacks in design, ShareFaith absolutely makes back in its church-specific features.
For starters, the builder allows you to upload your Sunday message and sermons through audio or video. There's also a Sunday school and vacation bible school (VBS) scheduler and planner. This will help to keep the who, what, where, and how all in one place. Plus, it should also help to minimize confusion and keep things organized for the participants.
Sharefaith even allows you to add full background checks so that you can make sure that your ministry hires only the right people. The background check includes a complete 50 state sex offender search and even a verification of criminal records – that's an incredibly important thing for such an establishment.
Aside from a website builder, and background check for your organization, Sharefaith also offers a donation serve, church graphical designs, educational content for kids and grown-ups, and more. It's an all-in-one solution for both building your site and filling it up with relevant content.
But it's an expensive solution, too. Depending on which church website features you look for, ShareFaith will cost from $25 to $79 a month. The cheapest plan including a website builder will set you back a hefty $50 a month.
Ultimately, Sharefaith is still a very attractive option given its rich church-centric features. But, as for whether it’s the right church website builder for you...that depends on your budget and if you’re willing to budge design-wise.
Best church website builders compared
| SITE123 | Wix | GoDaddy Website Builder | Squarespace | Weebly | ShareFaith | |
| Brand: |  |  |  |  |  |  |
| Price: | $12.80/month | $16.00/month | $9.99/month | $16.00/month | $6.00/month | $50.00/month |
| Templates: | 160+ | 800+ | 20+ | 110+ | 60+ | 250+ |
| Key feature: | Simple block builder | Two website editors,customizable | Extensive marketing tools | Fully customizable templates | Simple eCommerce possibilities | Church-tailored tools |
| Free version: | Yes | Yes | Yes | 14-day free trial | Yes | 15-day trial |
| Discounts for non-profits: | ❌ | ❌ | In-Kind Donation Program | Additional 10% off | ❌ | ❌ |
| Review: | SITE123 review | Wix review | GoDaddy Website Builder review | Squarespace review | Weebly review | N/A |
How to create a church website?
Chances are, you already know exactly what you need to do – and you're simply looking for a platform to do things with.
But also...what if not? In that case, we've prepared a small checklist for you to follow.
Here are things you should do to create a church website:
- List out the features that you need. Choose the priorities.
- Choose your budget.
- Research, finding a website builder with the right price and features.
- Register, using the community's email address
- Put a church website together.
- Set up the crucial features – blogging, events, donations, etc.
The process here is simple – before making a site, make sure to list what you'll need. It could be donation features – or maybe you want to release periodic blog posts or even a podcast.
If so, you'll also need an option for people to subscribe to a mailing list to get notified when something new is released. Or maybe, you could even get a password-protected member area, so that you can have a private discussion place.
Then, check your budget: it may be interesting to sign up for something big and expensive, but you don't want to spend more than you can afford.
Whatever it is – make sure it's all planned out. That'll be helpful for the next step, where you'll need to choose the right platform. Hopefully, we made this part easier for you. If not, or you still wish to know more, check out a post about the best website builder for non-profits.
Wherever you know exactly what builder you want, sign up to the platform using your community's email address.
Why? When making a community site, people often use their own personal emails, only to see all the information, requests, and payment updates clogging their own inboxes. When the time comes to delegate some work to others, a long process of switching accounts begins.
Avoid that early – register with your church's email.
Finally, put a website together, using the simple tools available with each of the builders on the list. And finally – set up all the additional features you listed down in the beginning.
And there you have it: your church website is nice and complete!
Final thoughts
Events that happened in recent years are a proof that it's not enough to have one place for physical gatherings. This world is unexpected, therefore, communities, like church should develop a sturdy digital ground and offer alternative access to the community.
Therefore, a solid website builder is an excellent assistance that can help the church create a sympathetic and welcoming website. This way, the community won't lose access to a precious place. Hence, we recommend SITE123 which is is the best church website builder that will help the church meet communities' needs.
Offering an alternative, digital way, to access the church is a great way to glue the community even stronger.
Best website builder deals this week:
Church website builder FAQs
What should I put on my church website?
Your church website should be a place for your community – so, use it to include everything that you want it to see. News about future events, donation requests, blogs, and even podcasts can be a part of your church website.
What is the best website builder for churches?
If you're looking for a powerful, customizable solution – SITE123 is perhaps the best website builder for churches. Options like Squarespace are good too, as they offer plenty of easy-to-use tools and excellent templates to make running a church website easier than ever.
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