Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 One of the questions we get all the time is what platform should we use for our church website. Now you have a lot of choices out there, and there's lots of really good companies that do it, but we really believe that the best choice is WordPress. In today's episode, we have seven reasons why we hope it helps your church reach more people and grow. This is the retried podcast. You're listening to the read-write 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 cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help your church see more visitors and grow Well. Hey guys, welcome to the retry podcast. Episode number 66. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost, the and
Speaker 3 00:01:07 Hyatt what's up Thomas.
Speaker 0 00:01:09 Hey, not too much man. Excited for our conversation today. We're going to be talking about seven reasons why you should church, why you should choose WordPress for your church website, seven reasons why you choose WordPress for your church website. Uh, we think this is a, uh, a good conversation to have because there are lots of options out there nowadays for a church content management system. And we think WordPress is the, uh, the pinnacle it's the best. Uh, and there's a handful of reasons why we want to share with our audience. So you talk to churches every day, uh, that are doing web development projects and stuff. What I mean, I, we know that WordPress is the most widely used. What else do you hear? What other options do you hear mostly nowadays? Well, first of all,
Speaker 3 00:01:54 Well, I hear most people are familiar with it. Uh, I would say like when I ask, uh, you know, when I talk about WordPress, you know, oh yeah, yeah. I know we know where I they've used it in the past maybe or whatever, but, um, yeah, you know, of course Squarespace, uh, is widely used. Now that's one of the ones that come up web flow. I've been hearing a little bit more about web flow lately. Uh, and, um, and yeah, you know, those, I, you know, those are a couple that come to mind.
Speaker 0 00:02:23 Yeah. We had a client. I remember that w how was using web flow and they, uh, it was just not doing what it needed to do for search engine optimization, but I, I know people get really married to these things, right. So I think this is an important decision because once you've, you've selected a church matter, a content management system, uh, it's really kind of hard to leave it. It takes a lot of work to leave versus just improving on the system that you have already. And that's one of the reasons we'll get into why WordPress really is such a good choice there. But yeah, there are so many, and I guess maybe it'd be good for our audience to talk a little bit about what, what is like, what is a content management system? What is this doing for churches? Um, I don't know. Do you want to go ahead and tackle?
Speaker 3 00:03:08 Yeah, essentially it's a, it's a software platform. It's what you use to design and update content on a website. Right. So those are, those are, you know, everyone uses so many terms when they explain software, right? So they, they, they talk about that. They just talk about plat, you hear the word platform and all of that, but essentially it's what you can build a website on and update a website with.
Speaker 0 00:03:35 Right? Yep. That's exactly right. So back when you and I started, uh, you know, the, the main content management system that people use, there were all kinds of proprietary ones. And then there were ones that were provided by like, uh, the big companies, like Adobe had one called Dreamweaver Dreamweaver. Yeah. There was, uh, drool and Joomla. Those were the big ones. And they were all not web based. So they were basically, they lived on a computer in a lot of ways, like, like Dreamweaver, it was software like Photoshop or illustrator. It's an Adobe suite. It still exists, but you build your HTML, you'll build your website, you'd build it offline. And then you'd host it somewhere else. And really what happened is there's been this big revolution of content management systems where all of the software that runs it, it lives online and you build your website on that platform. And so WordPress is bar none, the largest. Uh, it is a, uh, we saw a stat that it was 40% of websites out there run on a WordPress platform. So huge, huge system. And there's a number of reasons why it's the biggest and why we believe it's also the size. It also makes it the best because it's because it's the largest, because it's, there's a reason why it got to be the biggest. So you can go ahead and kick us off actually today with that first reason, why, why should churches use WordPress in
Speaker 3 00:05:01 This is a good first one for us to talk about here it's price, right? Every church is budget conscious and, and, and, you know, they, they want to get the best bang for their buck. You know, budgets are important for companies too, but, you know, specifically with churches, you know, with the way that they received their, their revenue and everything and their money. But so, yeah, it, the great thing with WordPress is it's, it's, what's called open source. That's the term. And that means it's basically it's open. It's not proprietary and it's free. So basically you can get started on it for free. Now, everyone knows that anything that's free is new. There's not going to be ever totally free. Right. So it is free though to get started. And you can, you can essentially build a website for free. You really can. There's going to be things that come along like plugins and tools that, that, that will have fees and those things, but the good news is from WordPress. You can essentially get started and even just set up a functional website for free.
Speaker 0 00:06:00 Yep. Yeah. So the, the core part of WordPress, the content management system itself is totally free and that is different from everybody else's model. So if you look at a Wix or a, uh, or a square space, or maybe a church specific one, there is a, there is a fee for just using the platform. So if you want to be on a Squarespace site, you're going to be stuck in spending some kind of a monthly fee and it's for hosting and the backend and all that stuff too. But there is a cost associated with that. And then you have all the ad-ons on top of that, WordPress. It does have ad-ons, there's lots of plugins, themes, other things you could buy, you have to pay for hosting, but for the software itself, the core of it that runs everything, uh, that all is included. Uh, so, uh, it's, it's something kind of like, think of it, like your, your operating system.
Speaker 0 00:06:49 Like a lot of days, there's a lot of talk that we're a windows is going to a free model. There's not going to be any fee to buy windows in the future, but you pay for all of the ad-ons you pay for Microsoft word, you pay for the software that you use on it. So the same thing goes for WordPress is that you would use the, the kernel, the core of it for free, and then you pay for any ad-ons that you may need. And thankfully, that the free part is actually very robust. I mean, I think that if we put our heads down, now, we, we choose to use some paid options because it makes the experience better. But if it really worked at it hard, we could do a site for really zero cost that you could, um, it would, it would look right. You could do a great website for something like that. So, yeah, the price is definitely right. And I think also because of its size, there are affordable and oftentimes free plugins that do just about anything you could want to do on the site too. So it's price for the ad-ons and everything. I think you'll almost always come out, uh, spending less money using a WordPress site than you would any other platform out there. So, yeah. Price really makes sense. It's good
Speaker 3 00:07:55 Stuff. Why don't you tackle the next
Speaker 0 00:07:56 One? Yeah. The next one is a theme options. Uh, so let me get a little bit into what we mean when we say a theme, when it comes to WordPress, uh, they have something called a theme, which is basically the starting point in the design for any site that you do. So when you build a WordPress website, the first choice you're going to make usually is choosing your theme every year, WordPress themselves comes out with a new theme for that year. That's kind of considered the gold standard or the great starting point. It's the one that's going to be compatible with everything that is WordPress. It is the, uh, kind of the, the main theme that it uses, but there are thousands and thousands of other themes. Some of them free, some of them paid, usually not very expensive, even a paid fee might range between about $20 and a hundred dollars.
Speaker 0 00:08:45 They're usually not too expensive out there. And what they are, is there a, a pre-made kind of design start point within which you would be able to get in and customize your site? So don't think like it's a, it's kind of a template in a way, like it's a pre-made site, but the expectation is you would take that and then you would customize it and make it really fit for your business. Or in this case, your church, you can really customize that theme there. So the nice thing about WordPress is because it is so large and there are so many different, uh, people out there building for it, and somebody will use it. There are lots and lots of people that are in the business of making WordPress themes, designing stuff. And so some of the best web designers in the world have devoted themselves to making really great, really functional themes. In fact, the leading place where you could go and buy themes is a site called theme forest. There are over 11,000 different themes that you can choose from on there. So a huge number of starting points for four designs. And some of these are really fantastic work. I mean, really top-notch designers, and you can get this kind of work for, you know, 30 or $40 in some cases it's really nice to have those kinds of options.
Speaker 3 00:10:00 Yeah, it's funny. It made me think of a big and vast restaurant menu. How do you even choose from 11,000 themes, but they do have a lot of ways for you to narrow things down based upon what your business is, or obviously there's church specific themes and those types of things you can find with WordPress. But, and I think too, uh, you know, the reason why there's that many themes, 11,000 with theme forest is, is again, 40% of websites out there are on WordPress. So it makes sense that there's that many options for sure.
Speaker 0 00:10:32 The nice thing though, is that again, you have so many options that you're never gonna like be stuck having to have a website that looks just like every other church or business out there. I mean, there's 11,000 different options on there now. Not every one of those is great. And most of those aren't going to fit for you. I think that you could look at some of those church specific options that you mentioned, and there's a few dozen of those at least on right on theme forest. I think generally the churches should just choose some of the most widely used platforms. So we use one that's called the pro theme quite a bit. That's our personal favorite. It's actually made by a, it's a Christian company that does this called theme co really good people out there. Uh, but they, we use one called the pro theme for a lot of our web design projects. And I think what's great about it is that it just has so much built in functionality. So many plugins are included with it, and they really have a great system for editing the site. It's just really a, a great starting off point there, but there are many others to choose. If you want to see some recommendations, you can check some of our other posts out there. We have some really great info on that, on the site,
Speaker 3 00:11:39 A lot of options. So yeah, I'll get to the next point here. Um, and one of the other reasons to use WordPress is ownership. You know, I get this question all the time from pastors and ministry leaders is, uh, you know, if you, if they say for each right, builds a, you know, for us, do we own it? And that's the great thing I get to talk about that advantage of WordPress is yeah, because WordPress is not proprietary, you know, we didn't reach right. Did not develop WordPress in house. No, we didn't. And it'd be impressive if we did, but we didn't. But so because of that, because it's not proprietary, you know, you own the website, so many options out there, like Squarespace that we mentioned earlier, you know, you don't own your website, you're essentially kind of renting your, your website. So really with WordPress, not only do you own it, you have the freedom to migrate or take that website and all of its content to somewhere else, somewhere else, you, you would host it. Um, and so there is a lot of freedom and flexibility when it comes to ownership. And you know, when churches are thinking down the road and content so important now, and you look at what's happening with, you know, content on social media, you know, how that all belongs to Facebook and or just how things are censored and everything ownership has become something that's more of a priority when it comes to your website and your content that,
Speaker 0 00:13:01 Yeah, no, you're exactly right with that. I think that you and I have been through generations of web design work. And so we know that this was back in the day, this is a really big issue because there were so many companies doing websites and they were all building on proprietary software. Uh, so the problem is the day you leave that company, you don't have a website anymore. So if you don't want to pay that anymore, your website has gone. And the really hard thing is that because it's because you don't own it, like getting your old, like your sermons, for instance, getting that off of your old platform and onto something new is really hard. Uh, so a lot of people basically got held hostage by their website company with that. So I think that's still an issue. Uh, I don't think that the issue of like, you know, a big company like a Squarespace or a Wix, they're not going to be going away this year or next year.
Speaker 0 00:13:55 You know, I don't think that they're just going to disappear, but the fact is you are tied to that platform. And so if they decide at some point that we're going to stop developing, or some new platform comes along, that is really really a night and day, better than a Squarespace. It's going to be hard to move your stuff off of there and migrate all your content and get it onto a different platform or to go host it yourself because it just, it's not made that way. You are renting the space, the website and the content you put on there. I'm sure the contract says you still own the content, but in the end you don't have the kind of access to it that you would need. So this is an important consideration. I know it seems kind of like it's legal or technical, but I think it is important for churches to consider it when you can.
Speaker 0 00:14:39 It's important for you to own that content. And that's one of the great things about WordPress is you actually own your own site with that. So I'll get the next one. It's a it's ease of use. I think the reason why WordPress built the following, that it has, why 40% of people use it, why it's a great platform for someone who has never been on like, done anything on anything on the internet. And they want to start blogging. The reason for that is because it's so easy to use. It's something that, you know, the, the joke we say is that if you can edit a word document, you could probably manage a WordPress website. Um, but I think this is nice for churches
Speaker 3 00:15:15 Joke. I thought of another Jordan is we call it pastor friendly software
Speaker 0 00:15:20 Master friendly sophomore. Yeah. We've been saying that joke for, uh, for what, 10 years now, I guess it's been going. So the, uh, the idea though, is that it's easy to use and it's important. I think for churches because we oftentimes, and I think most of our audience, they're probably using volunteers to manage their website. And so the last thing you want to do is say, Hey, if you want to manage the website and you're a programmer, then you can come in and help us out with that. But you can lower that barrier to entry and say, Hey, if you want to manage the website and you can write in a word document, we can probably use you to help us be on our web team and help us keep things up to date on there. So I think just ease of use is a really important hurdle that churches have to clear.
Speaker 0 00:16:06 WordPress definitely passes that. I think it's something that, you know, we, we have just anybody on our team here at retract can get in there and help churches make changes to the site. It's not like it's rocket science. So, um, you know, there's a lot of work that that's not to say that you can't, if you have expertise, do really creative things, right. If you have like programming skills, you can really let that shine on WordPress, but for day-to-day stuff that churches have to do. So that's your editing, adding sermons, adding calendar events, uh, making little changes to, uh, your staff page, those kinds of things. That's something that every single person that can get onto a computer and update their Facebook page, they can update their WordPress page to.
Speaker 3 00:16:48 Yeah. And, and, you know, one little thing I'll add to that, you know, everyone says they want a user-friendly website and I don't think any company out there would say, yeah, we're not user-friendly, but we're impressed has proven this. And that's again, why it's widely used. And that's why we chose to use it as a company, because we are serving churches specifically. You made the point. We know that a lot of times churches, well, a lot of them are volunteer, ran and, or late leader ran and, and then just they're dependent upon, and that's a revolving door. You may have a volunteer for a little while. That is somewhat savvy, who I joked about the pastor friendly software. There's a lot of savvy pastors out there. So it's kind of a funny, it's not a patronizing type thing, but let's face it, churches, pastors, they're focused on people. And I still, even in a day and age where there are more savvy, pastors, pastors still would prefer to not have to go to web design school or learn HTML or whatever. So, uh, it is important for it to be user-friendly for the next man up, if you will, that in or an older church secretary, that's not as savvy or, and so on. So we, that's why we like it to in churches like that as well. So,
Speaker 0 00:18:01 Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, your, your people that are volunteering, they do change all the time. God willing, you know, our audience, the people that are listening, you're going to have the same web person for 20 years. Yeah. That would be fantastic. Don't count on it.
Speaker 3 00:18:16 Yeah. Well, good. The next one functionality, that's a big deal. Um, you know, we mentioned, uh, DOH WordPress is, is free and you can design a nice website for free plugins, uh, or another way to think of a plugin. That term is it's pretty widely known now, but just think of, as it, as a tool tools on your website, things that you can add in to the website that benefits you, a WordPress has hands down, probably the best functionality because they have a plugin for virtually in anything out there, but let's think of it specifically for churches. So on a church website, you know, probably the biggest thing that's going to need updating the most or most frequently would be sermons because that's a one that's a once a week update, right? That's something that's always happening, uh, at a church is that preaching once, if not more than once a week, um, you know, that's taking place.
Speaker 3 00:19:13 So, uh, WordPress has an amazing, uh, you know, sermon manager system, a way to update your sermons easily. Um, you know, there's a lot of other tools we can talk about too, but, uh, I, I, you and I both, um, have worked at web development companies that were proprietary and came up with certain tools and features, uh, that were good, but I've been impressed that since, you know, we've used WordPress, I really just see them come out with something that quite frankly, you know, w in our experience, you know, it's hard for other companies to come up with the type of tools and plugins that they do. They just, they really, they work well for church specific goals.
Speaker 0 00:19:56 Yeah. And to be clear, and I know you're not saying this, but WordPress themselves, they don't develop sermon tools, right? So WordPress isn't, they're not making church specific software, but that's the great thing about a giant community. And because so many people use this, the first place people are going to develop is on a, on a WordPress platform. So for instance, like you mentioned, our, our provider, the one that we use for our sermon management, uh, is a company called sermon manager. Uh, and they, uh, they have a, it's a company that's called WP for church. They have a product called sermon manager. It is fantastic. And it is simply the best system for managing sermons for churches. It helps people categorize their sermons by speaker, by scripture, by topic, by data preach the series. It was a part of, and people can search by all these different categories.
Speaker 0 00:20:46 It has graphics go with it. It handles video and audio, and it's all built over there. And here's the thing is the reason why we use plugins for WordPress is that not every site is the same. The needs of a church are very different from a needs of a plumber, right? A Palmer doesn't need a way to put up a weekly videos, usually of him doing plumbing, repairs, or talking about plumbing. Maybe that would be a good idea for SEO, but they probably don't do those kinds of things. Uh, a church doesn't need a way for people to, uh, find, uh, if, uh, their availability for people to come out to their house and do repairs there's different tools. And so there's different plugins that a plumber would use and a church would use. So churches it's usually, like we said, sermons, they'll usually use some kind of a calendaring system. Uh, we have some great tools that we use to help churches with small group management. A lot of church management softwares have plugins. Now that use WordPress, you can actually integrate your, your system in there. So there's lots of different ways that you can increase the functionality for a lot of church specific kind of work. Uh, and it really makes it a great, this is one of the great things about WordPress is it is bar none. The functionality is better than any other platform out there. Right.
Speaker 3 00:22:03 That's good. That's it. Once you grab the next one, which is a good segue into this, so we kind of covered it
Speaker 0 00:22:09 A little bit, but yeah. So number six is just the size of the development community, because there are so many people using WordPress websites, uh, tens of thousands of WordPress websites out there, there is an enormous community of people, some of the best minds in tech developing for the WordPress platform, because it is so widely used, that is the place that you want to be there. And so what that means for a church, uh, is that I think the biggest thing is you can know that there is, you can never say never, but there is very little chance that your website will become out of date or obsolete that the platform is just going to go under or go away. Because so many people it's this, what you'd call is like, it's called the network effect because so many people are using it. It just kind of builds upon itself. It snowballs and born mobile will develop for it. And so you're always going to have the best backend, the best plugins that are working for it, because there are more people and more money to be made doing WordPress development than any other place out there. Uh, so really it is a fantastic choice, I think, for, for churches, for that very recent, because of the size of the development.
Speaker 3 00:23:22 Yeah. And they can feel there's security in that. Right. There's security in that, uh, just knowing that it's going to be around and that, you know, for years to come, you're in, you're in good hands. So, um, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 0 00:23:32 Well, we've, we've worked for companies before. We know many companies that built proprietary software, and then they just decided that, you know, we it's just not as profitable anymore, so let's stop developing it. Well, we don't have to keep developing this here. And so that leaves all of the users and quite a conundrum is that they have, you know, software, it, it gets old pretty quick, right? Like, so the stuff like WordPress, if I put, set up a WordPress website six years ago, uh, and we haven't made any updates, so we didn't update WordPress itself, it would be such a dramatic difference from what WordPress is today, because it's constantly developing. It's always getting better in those things. So that happens all the time to website providers out there to content management systems. So you want to choose the one that has the least risk of not being useful anymore or not continuing to be developed because a six year old content management system is not doing any of the things that you needed to do for right now. Right. So that's really important, I think.
Speaker 3 00:24:30 Yeah, good. Well, I'll tackle the last one here and last but not least that, that it's compatibility. So you should use WordPress because of its compatibility. So it plays nicely that we say this all the time, WordPress plays nicely with others, and I get questions like, uh, we use this for online giving, can we plug that into your website? We use this calendar system, you know, and, and it works really well. Our church secretary knows how to do it, or, you know, I get questions sometimes not, this is a rare thing, but there's some like discipleship based ministries that want to, uh, provide a curriculum or online courses for completion. And they need a special plugin, um, that will allow people to take specific tests or courses online. And the cool thing is, is in a lot of it, because of like, what we just talked about is how big of a development community it is.
Speaker 3 00:25:27 There's virtually a plugin for anything you need to do out there. Um, we had, uh, we worked, it didn't wait. It was a very rare thing. We had someone that was selling school curriculum, but it needed specific functionality for that. And because of the compel compatibility of WordPress, um, and that there's basically a plugin for anything. Um, it's great. I get to tell when I get a question, can we do this out here? We need to, and it's something different than just sermons or events, right. If it's something unique, like we kind of talked about, I'm like, yeah, 99%. Sure. You know, we always check in want to verify, but 99% sure because of how vast WordPress is and how well it plays nicely with others. So
Speaker 0 00:26:12 He done online. You could probably do it easily on WordPress, because again, there's a reason why it has such a huge market share. And here's what happens is so a software company comes up, let's say it's an online giving provider or a church management software. That's probably the most common. So, um, if you have a church management software company and your clients are always asking you, Hey, can this integrate with my website? It would be so nice if it would integrate with my site, if you're gonna spend the time to build those integrations, the first thing you're going to do is build it on WordPress, because chances are 40% of your clients are using that. And then the rest of the platforms are they make up 5% of this and 10% for this. And so you have all this other piecemeal work to do, whereas you can knock out 40% of your clients with one stone, if you do it on WordPress first.
Speaker 0 00:27:01 So the nice thing is almost everybody is always going to build compatibility with WordPress first, and then they'll try to get other stuff as they get requests for things. So, yeah, like you were saying, almost always, it's really fun to say, can we do this? The answer is almost always yes. Now how we do it. I don't know sometimes how do we, how do we make this functionality work? How do we get that plugin to work properly? Sometimes it takes a little bit of research to figure it out, but in the end, if you've seen it online, we can probably do it in WordPress. So it's a nice, it's a nice thing to have on something on a platform like that. Anything to close with any final thoughts or to begin?
Speaker 3 00:27:38 No, I think just, you know, overall, it's just, there's so much flexibility with WordPress and again, there's other great platforms out there and so on, but I think, you know, with these advantages to WordPress, I mean, a church could really feel safe and secure. Uh, and, and I think just that they're, that they're set for the future too, right. Because I mean, the internet is constantly in websites and everything is constantly developing and changing. So, uh, so I think it's just, it's extremely flexible and I think it's, you could just be, it's a sure bet.
Speaker 0 00:28:10 Yep. I think you're right. I think that that's something. So, uh, if you are looking at doing a new website, I think WordPress is the place that we would start and probably finish. I think it is the best choice for churches. Uh, if you are looking for help in that, um, I we'd love to chat with you. You could fill out a form on our site. We offer a service called a free website strategy review. It's specifically for churches where we'll kind of give you some input on what's not working about your current website. Uh, that's totally free, no obligation at all. Uh, feel free to fill that out on our website. We'll put a link in the description here below this video or audio, if you're, if you're listening to us online, thank you guys so much for being a part of our retried family. If this, if this episode has meant something to you or have been helpful, let us know in the comments, uh, keep us posted on that. Uh, but most of all, subscribe and share, uh, let other people know about, uh, what you found here in the retrial podcast. Thanks for being part of the retried family. And we hope to catch you next week.
Speaker 0 00:29:08 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.
