Does a parish need its own website?

A lot of parishes already have a page somewhere. Maybe it's a shared page on a diocese-wide scheme, maybe it's the parish's entry on A Church Near You, maybe it's an old site nobody's touched in a couple of years. The question isn't whether your church has any presence online — most do — it's whether that presence is actually doing its job.

What a parish website is for

Three things, mostly. First, telling someone who's never been before what to expect: where the building is, when the services are, and what a first visit looks like. Second, keeping your own congregation informed: news, events, changes to the usual pattern. Third, meeting a set of responsibilities that come with having a public-facing page at all — safeguarding contact details being the clearest example.

A shared diocese page can sometimes manage the first of these. It rarely manages the second well, because it's shared with dozens of other parishes and updated on someone else's schedule. And it often doesn't manage the third at all, since safeguarding information needs to be specific to your parish's own DSA and Parish Safeguarding Officer, not a generic diocesan contact.

Signs a shared page has stopped being enough

• Service times on the page don't match what actually happens on a Sunday
• There's nowhere obvious for a newcomer to read anything beyond "when" and "where"
• News and events for your specific parish get lost among other parishes on the same scheme
• Nobody can point to safeguarding contact details on the page at all

None of this means the diocese scheme is doing anything wrong. It's built to serve every parish in the diocese at once, which is a different job from serving yours specifically.

What a dedicated site changes

A website built for your parish, and only your parish, means the home page is actually about your church. Safeguarding contact details are specific to your parish, visible on the front page, not buried in a diocesan directory. News stays current because someone sends it to me every week, rather than waiting for a scheduled diocesan update. See What You Get for the full list of what a build includes.

For churches sharing a vicar across several parishes, the same logic applies at group level — see Groups & Benefices.

What it costs to find out

Nothing. A conversation about whether this is the right fit for your parish costs nothing, and if you go ahead, the site itself is free too, funded by sponsors rather than billed to your church. See Sponsorship for how that works.