What Church of England guidance actually asks of your website

A lot of parish websites carry no safeguarding information at all, not out of neglect but because it's easy to overlook when a site was built years ago, before current guidance existed. Here's what the guidance actually asks for, in plain terms, so you can check your own site against it.

The three requirements

• Information about how to contact your Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser(s) (DSA) and/or Parish Safeguarding Officer
• An explanation of how to get help outside the church with a child or adult safeguarding issue
• Safeguarding arrangements clearly visible on the front page — not several clicks deep

Where a parish doesn't have its own website, the guidance points to using the parish's page on A Church Near You to carry this information instead.

A quick way to check your own site

Open your church's homepage and time yourself. If it takes more than a few seconds to find who to contact about a safeguarding concern, it's probably not meeting the "clearly visible on the front page" requirement. If there's no dedicated safeguarding page at all, that's worth fixing regardless of which provider built your site.

Why this matters beyond compliance

For a lot of visitors, your website is the first and sometimes only contact they have with your church before they need help. The right information, in the right place, can be the difference between someone knowing how to raise a concern and someone not knowing where to turn. That's a bigger reason to get this right than any guideline.

How every site here handles it

Safeguarding contact details go on the front page of every build, not just linked from a footer, along with a dedicated safeguarding page and clear signposting to help outside the church. For a group of parishes, each church's own contacts are shown against its own section. Fraud awareness gets the same treatment, with signposting to Action Fraud. See Safeguarding & Online Safety for the full detail.