How to build a church website on Squarespace
Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links. If you click through and pay for a product, I’ll be compensated at no cost to you.
These days, having a beautiful and effective church website is an absolute MUST. It’s not about competing with other churches. It’s about helping people who are looking for your kind of church, FIND your church and VISIT your church.
That said, building a new church website is usually time consuming and expensive. And let’s be honest, it should be.
When you endeavor to build a church website, you are essentially creating the most substantial marketing tool your church will ever have. Your new church website will need to be organized, strategic, and it needs to look AMAZING.
So let’s move past the notion that building a church website is easy or simple. It’s not. But it is IMPORTANT. So this post is an introduction to what it takes to build your own church website on what I think is the best overall website building platform, Squarespace.
Here we go!
Step 1: Gather and organize your content
Before you open an account or research designs, I would implore you to first take some time to gather and/or create your primary content. What I’m talking about here is your copywriting, photography, videography, and other miscellaneous items like contact information, staff titles, social links, and such.
This step is arguably the most important because you could build beautiful designs, but with no strategic or compelling content, it simply won’t come together.
To help you with this step, I’ve created the ultimate church website content checklist. This handy tool will provide you with everything you need to gathering and/or create the content you’re going to NEED for your new church website.
Step 2: Wireframe your new Squarespace church website
An important first step to creating any new website is to create a wireframe of your new website. Wireframing is a pre-design step that allows you to layout the flow and navigation of your website before getting fancy with design.
One of the huge advantages with using Squarespace is that you can actually kill two birds with one stone and create a wireframe in Squarespace, which you can then transition into your actual website.
In fact, I’ve created a powerful resource for just this purpose. My Wireframe Template is a Squarespace church website that comes preloaded with tons of wireframe templates for all of the go-to page structures and designs that I use everyday on my church website builds.
Once you choose your wireframes and flow, you can use these templates to create beautiful designs and launch them as your actual church website.
Note: When you create your own account, you’ll have to pay full price for your Squarespace account and only have 2-weeks free trial before you’re forced to subscribe. If you purchase one of my templates, you’ll get a 6-month trial time and 20% discount. The 20% off amounts to over $55 in savings on your first year’s subscription to Squarespace, which is more than the cost of the template, so….might want to save money and get your website on the fast track to success :)
Step 3: Create a Squarespace account for your church website
If you decide to go it alone and not use the Wireframe Template, that’s totally cool. You can just create your own church website from scratch. Just go to Squarespace and start your account.
Step 4: Set your design styles
Once you’ve created your Squarespace account, you’ll want to go into your site styles area and set all of your design settings. These are things like font choice and size, color palette, button style, and more.
These are all key areas of website design and it really helps to figure this out in the beginning of your build instead of in the middle of it.
Step 5: Build your page templates
Once you have your wireframe and design styles figured out, you can create the more detailed designs for the various kinds of pages you’re going to use. I would recommend creating templates for ministries, heavy copywriting pages, content library pages (sermons, small groups, etc), scrolling section pages, and simple one section pages.
Once you’re satisfied with each of these templates, you can duplicate the pages over and over again for each of the pages in your navigation.
Step 6: Populate your church website with content
Once you have all of your pages created, you can take all of the content you gathered in step 1 and apply it to your individual pages. You may need to adjust some content here and there to fit your designs.
Step 7: Review your Squarespace church website for errors
Once your website is finished, don’t forget to thoroughly review the site for errors, broken links, and typos. You put a lot of work into creating some beautiful designs and strategic content. Don’t let that hard work go unnoticed because you make a simple typo or spelling error.
Step 8: Launch your new Squarespace church website on your domain
Once you’ve checked things over, now you’re ready to launch! Unfortunately, launching a website on a domain is often one of the more challenging and sometimes frustrating steps for any web designer. I would highly recommend launching your Squarespace website on either Google Domains or GoDaddy, as both of these have proven to connect very easily.
If this isn’t an option for you or you just don’t want to make that change, I would recommend connecting with someone in your church who is comfortable with domain registrations and DNS Management to make sure the launch goes smoothly.
Need some help building your new church website on Squarespace?
Feeling a little overwhelmed with the idea of building your own church website from scratch? That’s totally understandable. I’ve found most people who manage church communications aren’t actually website designers. So here's a few options you may find helpful.
Download our free ultimate church website content checklist. This free resource will help you get an idea of the kind of content you’ll need to create and/or gather before you get started.
Purchase our Squarespace church website Wireframe Template. This template will save you hours of time building the page layouts as you’ll be able to simply choose from, save, and customize from a selection of rebuilt layouts. This template literally pays for itself as the discount it automatically gives you on your first year of Squarespace subscription is more than the cost of the template :)
Custom design: Has all of this DIY talk made you see cross-eyed? I get it. I wish I could say building your own church website is easy, but the truth is, it’s a lot of work. If you DIY doesn’t see like the best choice for your church, I want to invite you to reach out and let’s jump on a short discovery call to see if a custom church website partnership would be a better fit for you.
