Guide · For churches
Best Website Builder for Churches (2026)
A church website serves your congregation, welcomes visitors, and shares your community with the wider world. It needs to feel warm and welcoming, load quickly on any device, and make it easy for people to find service times, access sermons, and give online. Most general website builders can handle this — and some purpose-built church platforms do it even better.
Churches sit in an unusual spot for website tools: budgets are often tight and largely volunteer-run, but expectations from visitors are the same as any other organisation — fast load times, mobile-friendly design, and an unmissable way to find service times. The good news is that some of the best free and low-cost options on the market happen to suit churches particularly well.
This guide compares general-purpose builders against church-specific platforms, and breaks down which fits best depending on your congregation's size and needs.
Quick comparison
| Builder | Best for | Free plan | Starting price | Giving tools |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | Small-to-mid churches, flexibility | Yes | ~$17/mo | Via Stripe/PayPal |
| Squarespace | Design-forward congregations | No (14-day trial) | ~$16/mo | Via Stripe |
| WordPress.com | Tech-savvy volunteer teams | Yes (limited) | ~$25/mo (Business) | Via plugin |
| Ekklesia 360 | Multi-campus, larger churches | No | Custom pricing | Built-in ChMS |
| Ministry Designs | Sermon hosting + streaming | No | ~$14/mo | Built in |
What church websites typically need
- Event calendar — service times, community events, special services
- Sermon archive — audio, video, or written sermon library
- Online giving / donations — secure tithing and offering collection
- Ministry pages — sections for children's ministry, youth group, small groups
- Photo galleries — congregation events and community life
- Contact and directions — maps, parking information, phone numbers
- Email sign-up — weekly newsletter and announcements
- "Plan your visit" page — the single most valuable page for converting first-time visitors
Our top picks for churches
Wix
The strongest all-round choice for churches. A genuinely usable free plan for getting started, church-specific templates, and paid plans (~$17/month) that add a custom domain, video hosting for sermons, and event management. Flexible enough to grow as your congregation and ministries grow.
Squarespace
Beautiful templates that translate naturally into a warm, dignified church aesthetic. Good for adding a donation button (via Stripe) and an events calendar. Not the cheapest option, but design quality is consistently high with minimal effort.
WordPress.com
Best for churches with a tech-savvy volunteer willing to manage plugins and updates. The free plan is genuinely useful, and the Nonprofit discount brings paid plans to roughly $3–8/month for registered charities. Excellent for sermon archives and regular news posts.
Ekklesia 360
A full-featured church website platform with church management system (ChMS) integration built in. Best for larger churches with staff managing multiple ministries or campuses, where a general builder's flexibility becomes a liability rather than an asset.
Wix — detailed review
Wix strikes the best balance for most churches between cost, flexibility, and ease of use. Its free plan is capable enough for a small congregation to get a real site live without spending anything, and the paid tier adds the custom domain and video hosting most churches eventually want for streaming sermons.
Pros:- Genuinely usable free plan, unusual among mainstream builders
- Church-specific templates available
- Event management and video hosting on paid plans
- Nonprofit discount program for qualifying organisations
- Free plan shows Wix ads and a branded subdomain
- Giving requires a Stripe/PayPal integration rather than a purpose-built tithing tool
- Larger multi-campus churches may outgrow its structure
Price: Free · Light from ~$17/mo (billed annually)
Squarespace — detailed review
Squarespace's templates suit churches that prioritise a calm, welcoming visual identity over deep customisation. The editor's simplicity is an advantage for volunteer-run churches without dedicated tech staff, though it lacks a free tier, which matters more for churches operating on donation-funded, unpredictable budgets.
Pros:- Consistently polished, welcoming template designs
- Simple editor suited to volunteer webmasters
- Good blog/news tools for weekly announcements
- No free plan — 14-day trial only
- Giving requires manual Stripe integration, not a dedicated tithing feature
- Less layout flexibility than Wix for unusual ministry page structures
Price: Personal from ~$16/mo · Business from ~$23/mo (billed annually)
WordPress.com — detailed review
For churches with a member who's comfortable with a bit of technical setup, WordPress offers the deepest content tools and the biggest discount ceiling through its verified nonprofit program. Sermon archives in particular benefit from WordPress's mature media library and category/tag system, which scales well past hundreds of past sermons.
Pros:- Free plan is genuinely usable for a small church presence
- Best-in-class content tools for sermon archives and news
- Nonprofit discount brings paid plans to $3–8/month for eligible charities
- Requires more setup time and comfort with plugins
- Giving and event calendars need third-party plugins
- Design polish depends heavily on theme choice
Price: Free (limited) · Business from ~$25/mo, ~$3–8/mo with nonprofit discount
Best builder by congregation type
Small congregations
Wix Free or WordPress.com Free — a small church with a limited budget and a single volunteer managing the site should start with a genuinely free plan, upgrading to a custom domain (from ~$6–17/month) once the congregation and budget grow.
Multi-campus churches
Ekklesia 360 or WordPress.com — multi-campus churches need per-campus service times, staff, and event pages, with a way to filter content by location. A purpose-built ChMS-integrated platform handles this structure from the start better than a general builder retrofitted for it.
Churches needing online giving as a priority
Ministry Designs or a general builder paired with Tithe.ly, Pushpay, or Subsplash Giving — these platforms are optimised specifically for recurring giving and mobile giving apps, which convert meaningfully better than a generic Stripe donate button for regular tithers.
Churches with active youth and small-group programs
Wix — its flexible page structure handles the proliferation of ministry sub-pages (youth group, small groups, children's ministry, men's/women's ministries) more gracefully than Squarespace's more rigid section-based editor once you're past a handful of ministry pages.
Church plants on tight budgets
Wix Free or WordPress.com Free — church plants typically need only a homepage, service times, a "plan your visit" page, and a contact form. Both free plans cover this comfortably, letting a new church save its early giving for ministry rather than web hosting.
Online giving
Most general builders support donations through Stripe or PayPal embeds. Purpose-built church platforms often include Tithe.ly, Pushpay, or Subsplash Giving integration, which are optimised for recurring giving and mobile apps. If online giving is a priority — as it increasingly is for churches seeing more digital-first tithing — a church-specific giving platform justifies its cost even when the rest of the site runs on a general builder.
Involving your congregation in site upkeep
Church websites are almost always maintained by volunteers rather than paid staff, which makes ease of use a bigger factor than it is for a typical small business. A platform where a non-technical volunteer can update service times, add an event, or post a new sermon without help from a developer keeps the site current — and a stale site with last year's Easter service listed at the top does real damage to how a first-time visitor perceives the church. Wix and Squarespace's simple block-based editors tend to be the easiest for volunteer teams to hand off between people as responsibilities change year to year.
It's worth documenting a simple internal guide — even a single page — showing whoever currently manages the site how to update the calendar and post a new sermon. This one habit prevents the common failure mode where a founding volunteer moves on and the site quietly stops being updated for months.
Free and low-cost options for churches
Budget-conscious congregations have real, usable free options:
- Wix Free — full editor, no time limit, though it shows a wixsite.com subdomain and small ad banner.
- WordPress.com Free — a limited but genuinely usable plan for a basic sermon archive and news page.
- Nonprofit discounts — Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress.com all offer reduced pricing for verified nonprofits and religious organisations; apply for these even on a paid plan.
Many churches operate on tight, donation-dependent budgets. Starting free and upgrading only when a specific feature (custom domain, sermon video hosting, event registration) becomes a genuine bottleneck is a sound approach for a new or small congregation.
Livestreaming and hybrid worship
Since the shift toward hybrid worship, most churches now need some way to embed a livestream — whether through YouTube, Facebook Live, or a dedicated streaming service like Church Online Platform. Wix and Squarespace both support embedding a livestream player directly into a page, and WordPress can do the same with a simple embed block. For churches investing heavily in production quality, a purpose-built platform like Subsplash or Ministry Designs bundles streaming, giving, and the church app into one subscription, which can simplify management for a small volunteer media team.
Whichever platform you choose, keep the sermon archive organised by series and date from the start — a disorganised, unsearchable back-catalogue of sermons quickly becomes unusable, and re-organising hundreds of past videos later is far more work than maintaining structure as you go.
How to choose the right church website builder
Choose Wix if you want the best balance of cost, flexibility, and ease of use, with room to grow as your ministries expand.
Choose Squarespace if design polish matters most and your budget allows for a paid plan from day one.
Choose WordPress.com if you have a volunteer comfortable with some technical setup and want the deepest nonprofit discount and content tools.
Choose a purpose-built platform like Ekklesia 360 or Ministry Designs if you're a larger, multi-campus church that needs ChMS integration or heavy sermon streaming built in from the start.
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