Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 It's no secret that WordPress is our favorite content management system for church websites. And the reason for that is because it offers unprecedented flexibility. And it does that through the use of plugins, but not all plugins are created equal. In today's episode, we're going to talk about our top eight plugins for churches that you need to be using on your church website. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow. This is the reach right podcast. You're listening to the retried podcast, the show dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders reach people the right way, hosted by me, Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my co-host Ian Hyatt. We're here to help your church see more visitors and grow
Speaker 2 00:00:59 Ready to get ready to get boom
Speaker 0 00:01:07 Well, Hey guys, welcome to the right podcast. Episode number 70. I am your host Thomas Castello. And with me as always is my cohost,
Speaker 4 00:01:16 He and Hyatt what's up Thomas.
Speaker 0 00:01:17 Hey, not too much, man. Looking forward to chatting today, we're going to be talking about the eight best plugins WordPress plugins for churches. I think it's going to be a really good conversation for us to have, uh, it's no secret that, uh, had retried. We prefer and recommend WordPress as the content management system. Uh, we think it is bar none, the best system out there for most churches. We do. Yeah. So we're not only the, uh, the recommenders, but also the users of it. Um, just if you're not really familiar with WordPress rest assured we don't get anything by saying that we make no money from say, WordPress is the best. We don't have any tie to them. There's not a sponsorship available from WordPress to recommend it. We just want you to know that and that's the, what we choose. That's what we choose to build all of our websites on when we build sites here at reach. Right? So, uh, and one of the reasons for that is because of the versatility of the plugins that are available on WordPress, it's like no other system. It really lets you use plugins to accomplish just about anything. Uh, so we thought it would be a good conversation for us today to talk a little bit about which plugins we recommend for churches and why we recommend them. So, um, I think it should be a good conversation.
Speaker 4 00:02:37 It is. Yeah. And it's funny you say that, um, you know, I'm on the front lines working with churches day in and day out. And, uh, and the cool thing about with you mentioning the amount of plugins WordPress has is anytime I usually get a question, can we, our website do this like 99.9%? I could just say yes, because I know there's going to be a plugin out there for it because of, uh, how vast plugins
Speaker 0 00:03:01 For WordPress. So, and the reasoning behind this, we can, we talked, we did a whole episode a couple of weeks ago about why WordPress is our favorite content management system for churches. Uh, and the reason for this is because more people use WordPress than any other platform out there. So a huge portion of the internet is powered by WordPress. And so the first time, any kind of a app developer or any kind of organization, they want to build some kind of compatibility for websites. The first place they'll always do. It is on WordPress because that's the lion share of the websites that are out there. They won't be able to use WordPress in anything else. And that's not the take away from your, uh, your spaces or your weaknesses or your Weebly's or any of those other companies out there. They serve a purpose. Uh, if I were to guess they might even be, maybe it's slight, but maybe a little bit easier.
Speaker 0 00:03:57 Uh, I, I just think that the challenge is, is that as your website grows, you don't have quite the versatility and the customization options that you have with a WordPress. And I'm not saying WordPress is hard by any means. It's very easy for the average person to use, but as a general rule, the more closed and controlled and the less flexibility you have, the easier it is to use any kind of a product. Uh, so, uh, that's the case for this, but what really helps WordPress though, is the, it's the plugin, a world that they have created there, where there are, uh, tens of thousands of plugins available to put into your WordPress website. Uh, and the thing about that is though, is that it, it's not something where you should just put in every plugin. Like it's not just the, it's not the more the merrier, the more plugins you add, the more site loading time it takes, which tends to hurt you on search engines.
Speaker 0 00:04:52 And there's some things, there's some reasons why you shouldn't just flood your website with plugins. Now it's a constant battle for us. I think at retry, we probably have about 15 different plugins that are turned on at any given time, but I've seen some websites and churches even that have had 30 or 40 plugins. And that starts to have a, a real toll. So what we wanted to do in today's episode is take the time to talk about which plugins are probably right at the threshold of must have for churches. Now, there are some alternatives to these, but these are the ones that we recommend. We think these are the best ones that churches should be using on their WordPress website. And the nice thing is we know this because most of the needs that most churches have are kind of the same. Like there, there, there are some differences from church to church, but our, our message is the same and our methods. And a lot of cases are the same and most churches are going to need certain tools to accomplish certain things on their website. So we have kind of compiled the list of the ones that we like to use for churches, our go-to plugins. And we think these are great for any church out there. Yeah,
Speaker 4 00:05:56 Absolutely. And I'll kick it off with the first one. And I think this is a good one to lead out with because every church should use this and needs this plugin and that's Yoast Yoast. We talk a lot about SEO. Um, you know, we've been, we've been doing that on recent episodes and it's something we, I talked to a church churches every day about, uh, and anytime I get the question about how can we be more visible, online and rank higher when people are doing searches for churches in our city? The first thing I recommend is get Yoast because it is hands down the best SEO plugin. Again, we've mentioned this before SEO standing for search engine optimization. So again, basically what that, just, what that needs to mean to everyone is just how to be visible and rank high when people are looking for churches again. So, um,
Speaker 0 00:06:49 But what Yoast is, I've actually had experience with it. It's funny, even though I'm not, uh, in the day-to-day operations and hands-on on like our company website, I of course am familiar with everything we're doing there. Um, but, but, uh, I've actually had some experience with Yoast, uh, because we, we blog, uh, here at reach, right. And, and for a good season, I was blogging. And I, and I'll tell just any ministry leader and pastor out there that is not tech savvy. And I don't consider myself very knowledgeable with all this, but I don't consider myself tech savvy Yost was easy to use. Um, and when we were blogging, basically it just, as I was writing out certain keywords and things, it was just extremely easy for me to use. And I'm like, oh wow, I'm doing this. And it's helping the reach right. Website rank higher.
Speaker 0 00:07:38 So yeah, Yoast is one of the greatest values of any piece of software that I've ever used in my life. Yost is such a fantastic tool. Um, so a couple of things to note it is free. There are, it's a freemium model though. So the, the free piece is actually probably not enough for most churches, uh, the free Yoast plugin. Um, we pay for it and it's not expensive. It's like a hundred dollars a year, so like $10 a month or less than that. Uh, so it is a, it is, it is just fantastic software. That really is a comprehensive search engine optimization tool. Uh, it does two things, I guess, really well, that are super important. One is it does general settings on your site to make it as search friendly as possible. Uh, so it really takes all the, all the things that saves you a lot of time having to do this on each and every post.
Speaker 0 00:08:31 And, uh, it just makes your entire site search engine friendly by you putting in a little bit of information into there. But secondly, and I think really where it's worth its weight in gold. And you remember this, I'm sure from doing it is that on every single post or every single sermon or every single event, whatever you're creating on your website, it gives you, uh, this, uh, red light, orange light, uh, Greenlight kind of a system there. Uh, and it gives you, it rates your writing style and your keyword usage and your actual on page search engine optimization. It rates those things with a easy red, yellow, or orange then green, and really your checklist. Every single time you put out a piece of content is make all the lights green and it tell it it's all kinds of things like you wrote enough content.
Speaker 0 00:09:22 So it has to be a minimum of, uh, you'll get a, uh, a yellow light if it's less than, or if it's between 300 and 600 words, you'll get a green light. If it's over 600 words, um, if you're not using your keyword enough, it'll tell you, uh, if you're not using your keyword in the right place, if you're writing with the passive voice too much, that hurts you on search engines. It'll tell you if your writing has too much passive voice, or if you don't use enough transition words. And it really is very granular and detailed, but the software is fantastic. It helps you with linking into other content. So I use this plugin daily every single day, and I'm not even the, uh, the primary content creator. Uh, but I know that I have using this software every single day. So I can't recommend it enough.
Speaker 0 00:10:07 There's other search engine optimization, plugins out there. Um, I've used some of the other ones. We've certainly worked with churches that have used other ones. And in my opinion, it's not even close, uh, Yoast, even the free version, uh, is better than the paid versions of all the other ones. So I don't care if it's a ministry website, a church website, or a business website, whatever you're doing. I think the first plugin you probably ought to download is Yoast. So yeah, that's a glowing enough review. It's fantastic. Yeah. I think we accomplished that. All right. Next one. I'll get it is the, uh, the Facebook for WordPress plugin. Uh, so your church probably uses Facebook. Um, that's uh, most churches do, or I don't know if you heard this news that they changed their name today. Uh, it's been coming out that Facebook was going to change their name and they are now Metta is the name of the company because, you know, Facebook and Instagram and all those, uh, they were, uh, it's, it's all one company, WhatsApp messenger. It's all the same thing. A company now as a whole is no longer Facebook. Uh, it's going to be called Metta. Uh, so yeah, there you go. Interesting.
Speaker 4 00:11:12 I've been so busy today. I have not even had a chance to look up and see that, but I did, uh, I did gather something like that was coming.
Speaker 0 00:11:19 It will be, it'll be public knowledge. It just came out a couple hours ago. It'll be public knowledge by the time of this, uh, this podcast airs. I'm sure you'll all be a part of the metaverse. Uh, so it'll be, it'll be good, but the Facebook, or maybe it'll be called by them. The metaverse for WordPress plugin, who knows, but at some point, uh, this plugin, the WordPress or Facebook for WordPress plugin is something that every church that uses Facebook, which is most churches should be using. And what this plugin does is it helps you to embed what's called a Facebook pixel and to not get too technical on this, I don't, I want to save that, but this is a really important tool that lets Facebook gather information from what's happening on your church website. So for instance, let's say that your, um, you're running an ad for a, a harvest party you're doing at your church.
Speaker 0 00:12:13 That's coming up. Uh, it'll have already happened by the time this airs, but, uh, that's coming up this weekend for us. We're recording this on the 28th of October here. So we're right in the middle of that pre Halloween season. So we didn't hear costumes on this podcast. We probably should have in hindsight, but we'll plan better next year. But in the end, if you're doing a harvest party for your church and you're trying to promote that event, you decide, Hey, let's promote the event on Facebook. And then you send people back to your website. And if you're having some kind of a registration or your, your, what the pixel will do that you're able to put in there is it'll tell Facebook the kinds of people or the people that are actually clicking on that link. It'll tell them who's signing up for the harvest party, what they're doing, how long they're staying on your website, who's engaging with your content.
Speaker 0 00:13:04 And then what it does for Facebook is it lets them know that, oh, this kind of person that's interested in these things is the kind of person that would really like this ad or this event. So the Facebook Alydar algorithm, which is so smart, it can actually take that information. And then it'll start to show your ad to more and more people that are like the ones that are spending a lot of time on your site there. So we use this all the time here at reach, right? Cause we want to make sure that our advertising is shown to people that are interested in the kinds of services and the content we produce on this podcast and in our blog and those kinds of things. So if someone isn't interested in that, uh, Facebook's algorithm could learn by seeing, Hey, this person clicked on the ad, but then they clicked off after four seconds.
Speaker 0 00:13:52 So don't show the ad to people like that person anymore or show it to them. That's. And so it's a constantly evolving thing that helps your advertising be more effective. So if your church does any advertising on Facebook, which we think is a pretty good opportunity, especially coming into the holiday season and Easter time, it's really great. The Facebook for WordPress plugin, it makes advertising through Facebook and really communicate having those data, that data communicate with one another. It makes it really easy to do. That's so cool. Yeah. It's big brother. Like, but in a very positive way. Yeah. It's all big brother. Like I, I, we get those comments all the time on our, on our, our posts and you know, we, we, we leave some of them up when they're, you know, overtly negative and attacking us. We usually take them down. So our audience may not see those kinds of things, but you know, maybe this post will get some of that kind of content, but you know what the thing is is like we all, we all dislike it, right.
Speaker 0 00:14:49 I think we're all in the same boat is that we're all a little bit uncomfortable with how much data Google, Facebook, some of the are Metta, these, these people, how much they have on us there, but we all still using it. It's not like people are going up and they're not using Gmail because of it. They're still using Gmail. We're still using Google docs and most people still use Instagram. Or the favorite is when they say, you know what, I've had it with all the data that they're taking from me on Facebook, I'm going over to Instagram or I'm going to use Tik TOK, know one of those other ones. It's like, it really is the same. It's the world that we live in nowadays. And so, uh, I think we can use it for good, uh, by using that for the dog.
Speaker 4 00:15:29 That's what I'm saying. Even if you feel like it's, at least it's being used to lead people to what God's doing at the local church. So no, that's cool. So we'll go to the next one. I'm excited about I'll cover, which is a sermon manager. And I actually, I actually love this plugin. Uh, I show it off almost daily. Um, I do show it off daily actually. And, and so this is obviously, um, it's a sermon management system for you to have on your website where you can upload, uh, you know, recorded messages, uh, audio and video of course, video primarily is the best way to go with it. Um, but it is, it's a really interactive, um, I haven't really seen many sermon systems out there other than sermon manager that, that do more. Um, and so it just, it has a ton of features with it, um, and you know, to, to have for the user on the website. Um, but it is, it is a very church specific plugin, um, for sermons and, um, and, uh, anyone using WordPress should use this plugin. And as far as the church is concerned, in my opinion and really cool stuff, like you can add a series graphic, people can search by series, topic, book in the Bible. Um, it can be once that message is up, it could be easily shared on social media or really anywhere. Um, and, and it just really does anything that I think, um, a church would want to accomplish with their online messages.
Speaker 0 00:16:58 No, I think that's, it's definitely worth it. I think there's a little bit of cost for, I think they have a free version. Uh, we generally use the paid version when we're helping clients on that. And so I'm more familiar with that. Um, you know, there's a few competitors out there. There's a few people that make it, there's one called series engine. That's pretty good. I think too, but I think sermon manager, we we've tried them all and it was definitely our favorite, uh, sermon manager, I think is the best way to deliver sermons and build a video, a sermon archive for a church. I think what I love about it most is it really, it really works well with WordPress and how it's, how it's naturally built. So WordPress, one of the great things about it is that it is so search engine friendly because every single sermon in this instance is its own post.
Speaker 0 00:17:45 And so what sermon manager does is it makes a custom type called a sermon. Uh, and then it has all of the WordPress SEO flexibility just built right into that there. And on top of that, it builds some like distinct categories to go with it. So, uh, like you were mentioning some of them, you can filter messages by who preached the message, what the out of the Bible it was from what series, it was a part of what topic it was, what date it happened, what year it was all these different filtering capabilities. And so it makes for something really useful for people in the future. So if you are, uh, doing a counseling session with a couple, and you know that you did a series a while ago on marriage, or they want to get onto the website and just search for topics on marriage, we can send people to that and you can build kind of little, little mini series pages for them. And there's so many cool things you can do with this, but yeah, servant manager, I would end my search if I was doing a WordPress website, looking for a way to host sermons on there. I think sermon manager is bar on the best way to do that. Audio and video, both, uh, functioning. Obviously that's a must for nowadays, but yeah, it's really a great tool.
Speaker 4 00:18:58 Yeah, good stuff.
Speaker 0 00:19:00 Cool. I'll get the next one. Uh, it is the events calendar. The events calendar is the name of it, the events calendar. So there's a couple of options and this one was kind of neck and neck. There's another one that's called modern events calendar that we really like. We use both of these on some of our sites, depending on the application. But I think if I had to choose just one, because the church almost certainly needs an events plugin, right? You need something to deliver events. Uh, and any good event system is going to have just a ton of functionality. It will be able to handle signups right on there. It'll build calendars will have multiple views. Uh, it'll be able to, uh, to pull in the graphics onto different parts of the page. This is something that's really cool, but the events calendar really better than any other one.
Speaker 0 00:19:46 It, it takes all the boxes. So it's able to do all of those things and more, I find it to be really easy to use. And again, it has this ability to leverage what's already happening on WordPress. It's building a custom post type called an event. And then you can put in all your content and how amazing is it when people are searching for Christmas Eve services, when your Christmas Eve service event is something that's going to rank for content, because you've been intentional with it and you have an event around it. So it really does all of those things, right? So, yeah, we really liked the events calendar,
Speaker 4 00:20:20 And it looks good too. I'll say that because I've seen so many ugly calendars and let's face it. I mean, you know, no, when people are thinking about calendars, they're not really thinking of something visually appealing, probably, uh, you know, first that's not the first, uh, desire I would think with a calendar. But when you think about like the Google calendar, I've seen so many churches like plugin the Google calendar under their website, and it just looks awful. And Google, I use the Google calendar by the way, very functional. I use it, but on a church website, uh, it's just not good for a user that's coming there that may be interested in your events. And, um, and it just doesn't do as much, like you said, too, it doesn't check all the boxes and I've seen other, not just the Google calendar, but other calendars that maybe, uh, uh, churches using from their CRM system, uh, or something else that, you know, very functional, but just not aesthetically pleasing. And, and, uh, I think the events calendar actually looks really good and let's face it, you know, with the website being a tool to attract visitors. You want to look good? So I'll say that about it too. It looks good. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:21:25 I think it's exactly right. Yeah, it looks good. Um, there are lots of reasons to that. Again, we're not against the Google calendar. We use it for our business all the time at reach, right. That's what we operate on and we love it. Uh, it's just not good. It's not good enough for a church that is trying to create events that get found online for a, from a digital marketing perspective. Uh, it's, it's fine from a functionality perspective, but from a look and feel and a usefulness, it actually helping people find events at your church. It doesn't quite do the job there. So yeah, I think that's what I said to him. Good.
Speaker 4 00:22:00 We'll get the next one. Next one is a kismet. Uh, which, uh, to be honest, I didn't know about until today. Uh, so to be quite transparent with things, but, uh, and, and again, as I mentioned, you know, I'm not, uh, as hands-on, uh, with our, uh, web stuff that we do at reach, right. As far as our, our company website and everything. Uh, but however, whenever I did a little homework on this, I was like, oh, wow, this is, this is golden. And really we are in a time when spam is an all time high. Right. Um, so, uh, kismet, if I, I say that right. Kismet. Yeah. So kismet, um, is something that really helps you reduce spam. And I know it's really helped us too. We get spammed a lot here at reach. Right. Um, but yeah, I know you're a little more knowledgeable and can speak to a kismet a little bit better than I can.
Speaker 0 00:22:49 I mean, it's, it doesn't surprise me that you didn't know about it because it's not something that you have to use ever. And like, if it's doing its job, you never think about a kismet. It's, it's something that we all, we just want to live in a world where we're not getting barraged by spam. Uh, and what a kismet does is behind the scenes, without you ever touching it or doing anything with it, it gets almost all of the spam off of your website. At any time you have a website that has a form open in it, uh, that people can fill out a form, or it has a comment system in it, which I think any good, uh, website, you should have a comment system enabled. You're going to get people that get on there and write comments that are made to sell you something it's usually Viagra or Cialis or one of these kinds of things.
Speaker 0 00:23:35 We get those messages every single day. And some of them are wildly inappropriate of only fans sites and all this kind of stuff there. So, uh, but what, what this actually does is you turn it on when you get your WordPress website. And honestly, if it's doing its job, right, you'd never think about it again. You know, it's just something that we, we put it on our site, we put it on sites that we do, because it actually does that, but I want to give some people some numbers just because I think it's so important. Let me look at the updated numbers that we have here right now. So listen to this. So, uh, in the last six months alone, it has blocked 27,118 spam messages in the last six months. So that's, that's a lot of spam, that's over a hundred spam messages every single day that would go into our normal inbox or into our comment system.
Speaker 0 00:24:27 That's, that's over 200, every single day. It's a lot of spam messages that were, we would get here. And now we have a pretty well trafficked site. I imagine the average churches are going to get that much, but anytime you have some kind of an open site that allows for input, you're going to get this kind of content. So, uh, and they do some math. This is what was really interesting. They have this estimator on a kismet of how long it takes to deal with spam. They epi, they estimate that that would have taken us 15, 15 days to deal with it. 50 days of work to deal with these 27,000 messages of spam over the last six months. So that alone makes it totally worthwhile. So again, not something you need to think about everyday. I don't get in there and use a kismet every day, but it's working behind the scenes.
Speaker 0 00:25:12 It's doing its job and it is fantastic at it. There's nothing even close to a kismet when it comes to spam prevention on a website. Uh, so I, I think that w we'll be honest about ones where there's good competitors off. I have never seen anything close to a kismet. It, it does it, and there's no need to compete. Just start and end your search with the kismet. There you go. That's good stuff. Why don't you tackle the next one? Cool. We'll do. Uh, next one is gravity forms, gravity forms, which is, uh, every website, especially every church website needs a way to invite people to fill out a form. Or as we like to say, call people to action. We talk about that every single episode a year is we need to ask people to respond when they're on your website. If you don't want to just have a church bulletin online, you don't want it to just be a place where people go and get information and leave.
Speaker 0 00:26:00 We're going to ask people to do something. And the best way to do that is through forums. And there's lots of different options for forum systems out there. Uh, there's um, the next, most popular or next best would be one called contact form seven. Uh, that's the name of the, uh, the app there. And that's probably, uh, I think they have maybe a better free version or a more full featured free version, but it is also more complicated, I think, to use then gravity forms, which we have found having tested many of them to be bar none the best, uh, form system out there. The functionality here is off the charts. Uh, we use it, uh, every single day we get dozens of forms filled out every day. Uh, and, um, it's something that really helps us manage that and plays really nicely with others.
Speaker 0 00:26:47 So your church management software, for instance, uh, might have a way that I can't speak to all of them, but some of the larger ones have a way that when someone fills out a form on gravity forms, it'll automatically take that information, find them in your church management software and put that information into it. Uh, so it's something that's like, if you're using it, for instance, for a, let us know you're coming form on your plan, your visit page, it can put those people into your, into your church management software for the first time. It can automatically start an email sequence that starts to reach out to them. There's so many things that it can do with that there. So, uh, yeah, we, we think gravity forms is the best system out there. What do you have to add?
Speaker 4 00:27:29 It's always good to be able to kill two birds with one stone. And every church is busy. And especially if they're relying on volunteers to update a website and a church database software system. And I get that question all the time. And because here's the thing, a lot of the church database software systems, their forms that they provide, that you can even like plug into your website. They just don't look that good. And they don't, they just don't have a good user experience with them on it. Within a page. Gravity forms look really good when they're embedded on a, on a website page. And whenever I recommend gravity forms and someone has forms that are talking that are linked to their church management software, they always say, well, I don't want to have to fill the information in twice. You know, I don't want to get someone to fill out a gravity form. And then all of a sudden I have to go reenter them in there. So that's, I'm really glad you covered that because it does kill two birds with one stone and you end up looking better.
Speaker 0 00:28:24 Yeah. I think gravity forums. It's, it's also like, I think we think of them as so simple, right? So a form is just, it's a question and then there's a box for them to write in them, but we have found that like, creating really good forums, it makes for a very good user experience. And it also, it like, they have to have a lot of, a lot of like if then type things like, so if someone puts this in, then the form has to change and it has to handle that information differently. And then maybe ask a follow-up question. So for instance, if you're doing a register, your kids, um, like, and someone's going to pre-register their kids before they show up on a Sunday and maybe one of the questions is how many kids will you be checking in then? And they say three, then it'll make three different fields for them to list three different children and their allergies and their dates of birth and all that information.
Speaker 0 00:29:18 But it's not going to have a spot for seven because that's the largest number we would have. So it, this, the forums are smart enough to do just about any kind of task I've been able to throw at it. And we have some very complicated forums for people to fill out for information on local search engine optimization plans and all this kind of stuff, so that we have made some ultra detailed forms that include payments, all those kinds of things in them. So anything we can throw at it, we can figure it out, usually in gravity forms. Uh, so that's our, our recommended WordPress plugin for churches, for forum.
Speaker 4 00:29:50 Yeah, absolutely. I'll get the next one here, which is monster insights. You know, it's been said in church, you, you get what you measure. Right. So analytics are very important. Now, a lot of pastors and ministry leaders that I connect with there, you know, whereas maybe about, you know, five years ago or so I would talk about analytics and it was just kinda like, eh, what does that mean? You know, I didn't know about it a little bit, but more ministry leaders now are, are really, um, familiar with how important it is to, uh, measure, uh, stats and look at analytics and, um, and, and all of those things. And, and I think the pandemic, as much as I don't like talking about it anymore, at this point, this kind of did, um, really raise the awareness of how important it is to measure things that are happening online. Right. Especially when people were not physically coming. Um, so yeah, and I know, I know you've used this, I know that, uh, you're pretty knowledgeable about it. Maybe you can speak to some of the details and the, uh, the meat of, of what it provides.
Speaker 0 00:30:52 Yeah. This is another one of those every day tools for me, I don't think the average pastor is going to be looking at this every day, but you know, maybe a time or two a month or something like that. But what monster insights does is it helps you first off helps you link your WordPress website with Google analytics. So Google analytics is night and day, the best analytics software out there for any kind of website. It is the gold standard. The depth of what you can do in Google analytics is more than any church on earth will ever need. Uh, there's so much depth in there and things that you can measure. And, uh, it's, it's, it's totally for nerds. And that's a problem though, when it comes to most of us that we don't want to become nerds in order to understand this stuff and be able to analyze data and do those kinds of things that we have to do.
Speaker 0 00:31:42 Right? So what monster insights does is it helps us integrate Google analytics, and then it pulls the best information from Google analytics, the most useful things from there, and it pulls it right onto your WordPress website there. So things like which ones of which of our pages is getting the most traffic and how long are people staying on our sermons before they click off and go somewhere else. And some of that kind of data, things that are actually useful to you, it'll just know automatically that's the stuff that you'll want to know, and it'll pull it right onto your WordPress website there. So you don't have to go into Google analytics, it's right there on your dashboard. It makes really nice charts that show you how it's going, how it's trending. You can adjust them, take a look at them, measure it, you'll see how much traffic you're getting.
Speaker 0 00:32:30 And so, um, I think this is important. I think we're, we're like you're saying we're really starting to wise up and to know that, you know, just the number of people that were sitting there on Sunday, it's no longer the only metric that matters, but we pretended as if that money were the two metrics that really mattered, but engagement online numbers online. I think those things are really important. So, um, yeah, this is what monster insight does is it takes that it takes the measurement from something only nerds can do and turns it into something that the average person that can get onto your church website on the backend can take a look at. And I think the average pastor has that skillset to be able to make heads or tails of some of that.
Speaker 4 00:33:13 And I think it's cool. You mentioned that, you know, this is something they just can glance at once or twice a month too. So with everyone being busy, that's a good thing. So awesome. Last but not least.
Speaker 0 00:33:23 Yeah. Last but not least is Smosh smooth. If you're listening online and not seeing this it's S M U S H smush, uh, and what this app does again, this is another one that you don't want to think about very much. Um, I don't think about smush ever rarely, but it's on our site and what smush, it used to be called WP smush or WordPress smush. But what it does is it takes the images and other content pieces that you load onto the website and it automatically optimizes them so that they are at peak usefulness for your website for load times and for search engine optimization. So it takes a big image and smushes it down to be the right size for whatever application it's being shown on. So it's really advanced. And so it knows usually if you're on a mobile device or if you're on a desktop computer render different versions of this image, and it'll just save people at load times.
Speaker 0 00:34:23 And what that means for you is it's usually nanoseconds or it's, you know, it seems like it's not a big deal, right? So this site loads in 1.3 seconds, this site loads in 2.4, you know, so what's one second difference. Well, it's everything when it comes to search engine optimization there. So this is another one of those no-brainer ones you don't have to look at it. It does it all in the background. You don't have to decide to push every image or not. It's just you loaded image in there. Smush does its thing. You don't think about it. It just does it and makes it ready for you on WordPress there,
Speaker 4 00:34:56 I've seen so many church websites with just so many poorly sized images out there. And not only does that not look good, like you said, it hinders, you know, your search engine optimization and how visible and how well, and every church wants to be seen. You want to be seen when people are searching. So I think that's a big takeaway. And of course the aesthetics too, you want to look good? You want pictures to be sized well on the website too. So, um, so, you know, it's funny, uh, this has been something that I think has plagued. A lot of churches is the whole image challenge, uh, with their websites and everything. So it's good stuff
Speaker 0 00:35:28 Solves that problem for you. And you can take a ton of time to optimize it perfectly, and you can do this by hand, but swish just makes it so much easier for everybody involved with that. So, yeah. So that's our eight. These are the, you probably ought to the day, you get your church website to go out there. You can download these eight plugins, a couple of them like gravity forms. Uh, you might want to pay something for it, a kismet. It has a, uh, it has a paid, um, they ask, I think there's a free personal license. And it's kind of a question mark. We're not giving legal advice here, whether churches and nonprofits fall under the personal or the corporate, they're really neither. So which one you do on that? Um, it kind of depends there, but some of these are paid almost all of them.
Speaker 0 00:36:12 I think all of them do have free options. Uh, so for most churches, the free is a great, it's good enough to get you going and make things happen there. So yeah, these are the eight that we would go out there and get, I hope it's been helpful for you guys if it has been, or if you have a plugin that you think every church needs to use, let us know that in the comments, let us know down there. We'd love to talk about it. And maybe you're something we don't know about and we we'd love to hear more about yeah, absolutely. We are. So, uh, thank you so much guys, for being a part of the retried family. If this has meant something to you, please rate, review, subscribe, like comment to do all those things that you're supposed to do. That does mean a lot to us. And it's helped us to kind of build some momentum with the show. And, uh, we're hearing that it's helping more and more people. So that's really fun for us. So thank you guys for being a part of our retried family, and we hope to catch you next week.
Speaker 0 00:37:02 Thanks for listening to the reach right podcast. We hope this episode will help you reach people the right way, looking for more resources for your church, check us out online and reach right studios.com. If this episode has been helpful to you, it would mean the world to us. If you would rate, review and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you next week.
