For those who are relatively new to WordPress, plugins are those extra codes that you add to your site for additional functionalities.
With so many plugins to choose from, it becomes difficult for users to understand what plugins to implement in their websites functionalities.
Take for example a church website.
There are so many plugins that can be implemented in church websites, but of course there are those that actually work.
Think about every activity that goes on in the church world and imagine how technology can be of help.
Perhaps you want to be able to showcase your sermons and also collect donations from different volunteers to the church.
Apart from simply having a beautiful WordPress theme for your church website, think about some attractive features that can help you attract new visitors to the website.
By using the right plugins, you can customize your church website functionalities even when you have very limited knowledge of computer coding.
Below are some of the top WordPress plugins that you can incorporate in your church website to improve the back-end usability and user experience.
Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin
If there is one WordPress plugin you need to have in your church website, it is the Yoast SEO plugin.
Yoast SEO is one of the most used WordPress plugin having helped millions of website rank higher on search engines.
With so many users worldwide, then you should ask yourself what makes this plugin so attractive.
To start with, the Yoast SEO plugin has one main goal, SEO for everyone! With the growing demand for SEO services, the Yoast SEO plugin does the work for you.
By having this tool incorporated within your church website, you can stay on top of competition.
Yes, we said competition. We are living in a world of digital; churches.
With online sermons and ability to make church donations with the click of a button, it comes as no surprise that there are many church websites to contend with.
If you are still wondering how Yoast SEO functions, here is how.
- Helps in improving title and meta-description templating for better results in search engines
- State-of-the-art Schema implementation that enables search engines to make sense of what your church website is all about.
- Access to advanced XML sitemaps functions with a push of the button
- Automatic control over your breadcrumbs
- Automatic setting of canonical URLs in in order to avoid duplication of content
- Premium support to premium Yoast SEO members
- Ability to use the Yoast SEO plugin with other complementary tools such as Video SEO, News SEO and WooCommerce SEO tools
Apart from improving your ranking on search engines, Yoast SEO also enables you to develop killer content. The software allows you to develop SEO-friendly content based on the most popular keywords.
When using this tool, you can preview how your post or page will appear on the search engines. You can also use content-oriented filters to optimize your article’s content, synonyms and key phrases.
Google XML Sitemaps Plugin For WordPress
The Google XML Sitemaps plugin just like the Yoast SEO plugin aims to improve SEO by creating XML sitemaps that enable popular search engines such as Google, Bing and Ask.com better index your website.
With the XML Sitemaps plugin on your church website, it becomes easier for web crawlers to view the entire structure of your website and retrieve it in a more efficient manner.
This plugin is compatible with all types of WordPress generated pages and custom URLs.
Even better is that this tool sends a notification to search engines every time you create a new post on your website.
Over the years, The XML Sitemaps plugin has been rated as one of the best plugins for WordPress.
After installation, this tool will do exactly what it is supposed to-provide an XML sitemap of your church website to major search engines.
When this is happening, you will not have any interference with your site or a slowdown. The plugin features and functions can be translated to your language.
The Events Calendar WordPress Plugin
If you want to create and manage events calendar on your church website, the Events Calendar Plugin is a must-have tool for all your events planning and organization.
This tool is backed up by a number of amazing features that are not common with other event planning plugins on WordPress.
What makes this tool amazing is perhaps its ease of use.
Everything from the basic features to customization is easy.
The developers of this plugin admit that a lot of effort went into strategy, design, development and testing of the Events Calendar.
This is the reason why the tool’s support team is always on standby to address all your concerns via the WordPress.org support forum.
If you need a more direct response to your support issues, then you can subscribe to the Events Calendar PRO that gives you additional access to premium support services.
The response time for premium support services is between 24 to 48 hours.
By understanding how to use The Vents Calendar and configuring your settings based on your specific needs, you’ll be making events with just a few clicks of the button.
There are a host of awesome features and inbuilt tools to work with.
From a fast-to-load theme, partial override tools and template tags, to a host of different free extensions, it can only get better with the Events Calendar plugin.
The Prayer Engine WordPress Plugin
If you are looking to create powerful prayer walls and calendars, then this is a plugin you should have in your church website. Think about the idea of having everyone pray together.
With this tool, you can create an unlimited number of prayer-focused calendars to help your audience pray together.
Whether you want to initiate a “24 Hours of Prayer” prayer event for your online congregation or even pray for a specific event, this is made possible with a few clicks of the button by using the Prayer Engine Plugin.
If you are keen about the current trends, you will realize that technology has changed the way we communicate. Why can’t the way we pray also change?
The reason why Prayer Engine is such a social darling is simply because you can make social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram a valuable component of your prayer strategy.
Considering the amount of time you have spent trying to make your church website look amazing, you also need a tool that complements this look.
You do not even need to know a great amount of details about coding to customize the display settings.
A quick visit to the settings page will automatically let you change the appearance, style, icons and colors of your prayer pages in seconds.
When you think about it, Prayer Engine brings the concept of Real Ministry and Real Feedback to life.
Whenever there is a prayer request on the wall, visitors to the sites are encouraged to participate by clicking on the “I Prayed for This” button.
Every time someone clicks on this icon, the plugin automatically generates a response to the original submitter that someone has prayed for them.
Seamless Donations Plugin
When trying to raise funds through church donations for your church website, reaching your goal is not easy and requires a lot of hard work.
Why not take some rest using the Seamless Donations plugin.
Whether you are raising funds for a particular event, mission or campaign, this plugin is meant to help you track your donations and stay on top of your finances from a church website.
Apart from being a free WordPress plugin, Seamless Donations will also track your donors, the donations sent to you and also automatically send a thank you note to the donors.
What sets this plugin apart from any other donations tool for church websites is that donors can make donations anonymously and also have the option of subscribing to the website’s mailing list.
Seamless Donations plugin is an important financial management tool for your church website.
The tool has many features that are meant to save you time writing emails, organizing your email list and tracking your donations.
The installation procedure is also quite easy for even tech novices. After the installation, you only need to hit the activate button and you are set to go.
WP Church Donation Plugin
Online giving is one of the reasons why WordPress church websites have become a popular tool for taking donations. So why opt for a WordPress website in the first place?
To start with, creating a website with WordPress is free. But that is not all.
There are many free and paid church website themes that can be implemented via WordPress.
The whole idea of having a WordPress church website is that it significantly reduces the development cost.
Since most of the donations for churches are made online, the WP Church Donation Plugin is your best bet for online church donations.
Most online platforms use Authorize.net as the preferred payment gateway for processing online transactions through the use of MasterCard, Visa, Discover and many more debit and credit cards.
When you install the WP Church Donation plugin, you can start accepting donations through the church website via Authorize.net.
Below are some of the common features in WP Church Donation plugin:
- Ability to integrate Authorize.net to your church website as the main payment getaway
- Accept church donations using credit cards
- Easy-to-use payment gateway settings through the admin panel
- The donation code or coupon can be placed anywhere on the church website
- Keep a list of all donors with the details of the donation sent at the administrator’s dashboard
- Ability to export the donors and donations list to the admin panel
- When a donation is made, the tool automatically sends an email to the site’s administrator and the donor
- An easy-to-use content management platform
- A flexible and customizable thank you page that is editable and customizable.
- Ability to set a custom-donation amount
- Form validation from the server side using PHP and client side using jQuery
Church Admin Plugin
Have you ever thought about how complicated it is to organize, manage and communicate spiritual messages to your listeners and wonderful volunteers?
Relatively smaller churches face the challenge of managing schedules and rotas especially when there is more than one team to be managed.
If this is the situation for small churches, think about the kind of nightmare that large churches have.
This is the reason why the Church Admin Plugin for WordPress was created.
The tool is a secure and free church management tool that can be implemented within your WordPress church website to help you organize data, communicate and administer all church activities for your online congregation.
The tool features powerful planning features that enable you to make a schedule for volunteers and staff in the form of text messages and emails.
You can send a message to multiple recipients with a click of the button.
Even better is the fact that there is a Church Admin plugin app for iOS and Amazon devices.
Simply put, the tool has your congregation in your hands.
Contact Form 7 Plugin
The amazing thing about Contact Form 7 is that with this WordPress plugin, you can manage multiple forms and also customize the same in a more flexible way with a simple markup.
If you run a church website that receives things such as prayer requests and subscription to sermons, then this is no doubt the plugin that you must have on your site.
The form uses Ajax-powered submissions and also has CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering features. When installed in its default configuration, the Contact Form 7 plugin for WordPress does not:
- Use cookies
- Track user activity by stealth
- Write personal details on the database
- Send data to external servers
The only time that this plugin submits data to an external service provider is when you activate certain features on the settings.
The data submitted to the external service provider can include IP addresses.
It is therefore important to verify the privacy policy of the provider before installing the Contact Form 7 plugin.
The features that you need to confirm the privacy policy are:
- reCAPTCHA from Google
- Akismet which is automatic
- Constant Contact from Endurance International Group
The best thing about the Contact Form 7 is that it is open source software.
Church Content WordPress Plugin
The church Content WordPress Plugin is one tool that can help you launch a full-featured and attractive websites.
By using this plugin, it becomes possible to create an archive of sermons in any format.
You can save your sermons in video, audio, text or PDF formats or even organize them on the basis of series, speaker, topic or speaker.
Ideally, what we are talking about when using a church content WordPress plugin is flexibility.
Unlike popular belief, having a church website allows you to digitize church activities-perhaps the reason why people are turning to online churches.
This plugin also allows you to manage upcoming events by categorizing them in terms of date, time, location and the event category.
There is a way that you can implement this plugin to save the date and time for recurring events.
Another amazing feature that comes with this plugin is customization.
After detailing the location of different events on the church’s website, you can show the location of the event on a map and even customize it to pinpoint the exact location.
Some of the other important features in the church content WordPress plugin are:
- Sermon organization
- Event management
- Sermon podcasting
- Sermon media
- Recurring events
- Location management
- Location memory
- Recurring events
- Events exclusions
- Enhanced SEO
- Wording settings
- Easy theme-switching
- Translation ready
WPChurch Church Management System For WordPress
If you are in search of a church website WordPress plugin that manages things such as donations, expenses and other related modules, then you are in luck.
The WPChurch Church Management System was specifically created for WordPress websites and come with an easy-to-use interface.
The interface allows the user to easily check among other things the key stats on the site, calendar, infographics and other important reports on the church website.
Using the key information of the members, you can easily manage programs, assign members tasks as volunteers, sort through the members’ list using the available filters and remove from the list members you wish to delete.
Some of the other key features in this plugin include:
- Easy-to-use interface
- Member module
- Group module
- Activity module
- Donation module
- Room module
- Venue module
- Spiritual gift module
- Message module
- Newsletter module
- Admin and member settings
- Sermon module
- Pledge module
- Accountant module
- Reports module
Sermon Manager Plugin For WordPress
There is a great deal of things that you can do with the Sermon Manager Plugin on your WordPress website.
For starters, this plugin allows churches to publish their sermons online in an easy and efficient manner.
To make this possible, the user is able to categorize sermons depending on the set parameters.
You can categorize your sermons in terms of topics, speakers, the date of posting and many more.
The plugin also allows you to embed Youtube and Vimeo videos.
In the world of online sermons, it is important to improve the visuals of your content for increased traffic.
Apart from organizing your sermons in a much better way, you can add images to your sermons and also to certain speakers or series of content. T
he plugin also supports iTunes podcasting support for your sermons.
It is an ideal tool for a church website with a large volume of content that needs documentation.
It is also worth pointing out that this tool supports a wide variety of media such as PDF, Doc, MP3 and video content.
The sermon manager plugin for WordPress is free to use but you are required to pay for the support services.
W3 Total Cache
If your church website takes over 10 seconds to load, then visitors to the site are likely to leave the website before even checking out what it is all about.
To be honest, the online community is characterized by a fast-paced life.
A slow website tends to have a very high bounce-rate and a poor ranking on search engines.
To speed up your church website’s loading time, the best way to do it is by caching.
The W3 Total Cache is designed to increase the loading speed of WordPress websites.
The whole idea of using the W3 Total Cache is therefore to improve the user-experience of visitors to your church website.
When visitors search your church website, this plugin reduces the download period by providing information from the site through the cached data.
The W3 Total Cache is a popular tool with over 1 million active installs due to its wide range of features.
When using the W3 Total Cache on your church website, always make sure that the plugin does not interfere with your default configuration.
Are Church Website WordPress Plugins A Worthy Investment?
A well-designed and fully functional church website can go a long way in enabling you to expand your online church ministry.
If you have a clear-strategy about the primary role of your church website, then creating a WordPress church website cannot be problematic.
Different plugins for church websites are specific in terms of their functions.
The whole idea of having these plugins is so that they can assist in achieving the primary functions of your church websites.
With plugins such as Sermon Manager, Pray Box and The Event Calendar among others, you can serve the mission and vision goals of your church more effectively.
Don’t Forget Mobile Devices
While having a church website seems like an amazing idea, you are less-likely to make progress without mobile solutions for the website.
In order to improve the overall engagement for the current mobile-minded culture, make sure that you have easy-to-use mobile apps to complement your church website.
Final Words –
With the changes currently being experienced in the tech-world, you need to keep up with new innovations and trends available for church websites.
Do not bloat your church website with many WordPress plugins that you hardly use, install those that add value to your website’s user-experience both at the admin and client sides.
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