Wordpress Plugins for Your Church Website

When it comes to building and especially managing a church website, Wordpress is the ideal platform, because Wordpress can be so easily edited, managed, and there are so many great add ons for Wordpress that you can use for managing your church website. In this Hub, I'm going to talk about some of my favorite plug ins for church websites, which you may find useful when building your own church website.

How do you install a Wordpress plug-in? Quite simply, log into your Wordpress dashboard, and click "Plugins" and "Add New". In the search box, if you type in the name of the plug in's I mention here, just click "install now", and then click "activate" on the next screen, and you'll have installed the plug in. Some of these plug ins require that you configure them, but most of them are very simple to configure.

A web designer who is skilled in working with Wordpress, and who has built church websites before, such as Art and Tech Designs, could always set up your Wordpress church website, and configure everything so that you can more easily manage the site, without having to figure out the technical bits. I enjoy working on church websites.

One important plug in for any church website is the events calendar. This particular events calendar, by Kieran O'Shea, is very easy to use, and works well for a church website. The calendar also has many different widgets to add a brief listing of upcoming events to the front page of your website, or in the sidebar of every page.

The calendar is also able to be customized, so you can change the look to match the rest of your Wordpress theme. You can find more information about the Event Calendar plug in here.

When you add a link to an audio file on your church website, the audio file will automatically open up into whatever the default audio player on the visitor's computer is (usually a Quick Time Plugin of some sort). However, with this Audio Player Wordpress plug in, you can have a very nice looking, easy to customize audio player on your church website. One of the nicer features of this plug in is how it automatically grabs the colors from your theme's style sheet, and lets you select which of those theme colors to put on the audio player. Very nice!

When you are installing this particular plug in, do make sure, in your theme, that you have a "<?php wp_footer(); ?> " before the </body> tag, and a "<?php wp_head();?>" before the </head> tag, otherwise you will get an error on your site.

You can find out more about adding sermons to your church website at my other hub here.

One of the less pleasant aspect of internet life is spam. With a contact form on your church's website, you will cut down on the automated spam from spambots harvesting unprotected email addresses. Any email address that is just out there on a website can easily be "Captured" by spammers, and used. However, with a contact form, like Contact Form 7, you can protect your church's email address while still allowing people to contact you via the website.

The Next GEN Photo Gallery allows you to easily add a gallery of photos of your church or church events to your church's website. You don't need this to add individual photos to posts within the Wordpress website, of course, but the gallery will allow you to have a large group of photos up there (for example, for a specific event), in a very organized and attractive fashion, or create a slideshow of pictures for your Wordpress church website.

There are many great Wordpress themes that you can use for your church website, or you can have a web designer create a custom Wordpress theme for your church's website.

One affordable premium theme I have found particularly useful for church websites is Wordpress Remix 3.0. Wordpress Remix is very customizable, but it also allows you to have a very professional looking website without having to hire someone to create a custom Wordpress theme for you.

I've written another hub about using premium Wordpress themes here.