Having made quite a few websites for Church, I wanted to take few minutes for sharing Church website WordPress plugins list which I most used.
Alongside with clean and beautiful WordPress theme a church website must have some useful features as well. It will help attracting new visitors to website. Plugins allow you to customize your website without having much knowledge of any computer code. Plugins are additions to a website that enhance back-end usability or the user experience.
Church website must go beyond the purely informational website and then it can be truly useful. Plugins can come in very handy when you like to include some specific type of functionality of content which is not there in default WordPress setup.
Church Website WordPress Plugins
Since every church website demands different functionality, but church website WordPress plugins listed below can be installed in all church websites as they provide necessary and useful features.
PrayBox
It is a prayer request plugin which allows users to pray for requests or submit requests. Also allowing site administrator to manage prayer requests. Admin can moderate requests from the backend. To discourage improper usage plugin provides IP ban system as well. Furthermore, every time a request is prayed for, and the user clicks the “I Prayed For You” button, the requester will receive a nightly email detailing how many prayers they received that day.
To download or view more details, click here
Sermon Manager
This plugin helps churches to publish their sermons easily online. This plugin provide variety of features including:
- Categorize sermons by series, topics, speakers
- YouTube or Vimeo video embed facilities
- Attach images to sermons, topics, speakers and series
- Bib.ly integration for bible references
- iTunes podcasting support for sermons
- Wide variety of media support including PDF, PPT, MP3 and DOC
- Add Topics, Books, Service Types, Series and Speakers
- Great documentation
Sermon Manage plugin is free to use but their support is paid. To download or view more details, click here
The Events Calendar
Showing important information such as bible study, fundraisers, group meetings, choir rehearsals, services, etc… is a good way to get visitors involved with church community online. The Events Calendar is one of the popular plugin for church websites which provides comprehensive set of features for managing events on church website.
This plugin is also having PRO version for additional features, to download or view more details, click here
W3 Total Cache
If any website is taking 10-15 seconds then visitors are likely going to leave the site before they even have a chance to refer few elements on the site. This will increase the bounce rate as well as decrease the ranking in Google search results. Caching is the best way to speed up any site.
Furthermore, it is one of the popular WordPress cache plugin with 1+ million active installs and having wide range of features. Click here to download or view more details.
P.S. Although I found this plugin really useful in many of the WordPress sites I worked with but still, I recommend to make sure that this plugin it not causing conflicts with the default host server caching.
Akismet
WordPress installation comes Akismet plugin pre-installed. It is a comment spam filtering service. If your church website is having blog or pages where users can comment then this plugin is must have. Even if Akismet plugin comes pre-installed, you must activate it before using it. Akismet is free for non-business and personal sites.
All comments will have a history for users to view that shows which comments were cleared or flagged by Akismet. In addition, comments that were marked as spam or unmarked by a moderator will be highlighted in the history.
Click here to download or view more information about this plugin.
Google XML Sitemaps
XML sitemap is really a must have for helping search engines in better indexing website. Google XML Sitemaps plugin can generate XML sitemap for a website automatically. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.
In other words, with sitemaps search engines like Yahoo, Google, Bing, etc… will be notified whenever there is a new page or post on website.
Yoast SEO plugin (listed below) can also generate XML sitemap for a website automatically. So Google XML Sitemap plugin is not necessary if Yoast SEO plugin is installed.
Click here to download or view more information about this plugin.
Yoast SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This plugin is really helpful for any site built with WordPress. It comes with variety of features to start SEO of any site. This plugin can be really helpful in writing and keeping SEO friendly content on your church website.
If you are interested in getting more information then you can read this post Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress site
Free version can be downloaded from here and a premium version from here
Contact Form 7
With Contact Form 7 plugin one can add contact form on the website and setup email notifications with simple markup. Contact Form 7 also allows creating multiple forms. This plugin also supports Akismet filtering to prevent spam, Captcha and AJAX form submissions.
At the time of writing this post, over 5 million websites is having active installs of Contact Form 7.
You can also try Contact Form vCard Generator plugin to export all contact inquiries in .vcf file. This plugin provides facility to map different fields of contact form with vCard fields. Also allows downloading .vcf file having single or multiple contact inquiries.
Click here to read more information or download plugin.
WP Statistics
WP Statistics plugin is a comprehensive plugin to see website visitors statistics. It provides wide variety of statistics including online users, number of visitors within specific duration, map of visitors location, appearance of pages in search results on search engine, etc… In short with this plugin one can keep track on how pages or posts of your website is performing in search engine and visited by website visitors.
Click here to read more information or download plugin.
WP Church Donation
This plugin allows church websites to setup donation form and accept donation via Authorize.net very easily. After setting up form, it can be placed anywhere on the site using Short-Code. There are some other useful features as well including email notification, email content management, export donation entries, Auth.net settings, donation amount management, etc…
Download plugin from here.
To know more details please read this article Free WordPress plugin to receive online donation for Church
Broken Link Checker
This plugin monitors the links found in pages, comments and blogs and identify any broken link that is no longer working, missing image or redirecting to other sources. Once broken links are identified on any website, links can be edited directly from the plugin page to avoid manually updating each post.
Click here to download this plugin or read more information.
Backup WordPress
Probably no one wants to have a server crash or something similar and take their data with them. But it does happen to almost all websites at some point of time due to mistakes, server issues or hacks. My favorite plugin to combat these type of issues is with the Backup-WordPress plugin.
This plugin backup the entire site including database and all source code on a schedule that best suits the website. It’s simple to use, work on shared hosting and absolutely no setup required.
Click here to view more information or to download this plugin.
Final words on must have Church website WordPress plugins
A well designed and thought out church site can go a long way towards serving the vision and mission of the church. Building a church website with WordPress is not that much difficult with a correct plan and with the help of some plugins. The Event Calendar, Sermon Manager and Pray Box are really helpful for church websites and other plugin mentioned in the list of church website WordPress plugins are must have for one or another reason.
What are your favorite Church website WordPress plugins? I would really love to hear about more useful plugins which really helps in building a website for Church. Leave your comment to share your valuable suggestions.
Furthermore, you can also drop me an email in case if you like to build a great church website or need my help in building a church website.
Nice simple list. I would have to recommend WP Rocket for caching as it is way way simpler than W3.