This is a practical walkthrough, in the order you should actually do it. It assumes nobody on your team does this for a living, because usually nobody does.
First, decide who is doing this after you
More church websites die of abandonment than of bad design. One person builds it, that person moves away, and four years later the service time is still wrong because nobody else has the login.
So before anything else: pick two people, not one. Make sure both can edit it. Write the login details somewhere the church keeps its other important documents, not in one person's phone.
If you do nothing else on this list, do that.
Decide what the site is for
Your website is not for your members. They already know when you meet and where to park.
It is for the person who has never walked in: someone new in town, someone returning after a long time away, someone quietly working up the nerve. They will look at your website before they look at your building.
Every decision below follows from that.
The five pages you need
Home. Service times, address, and one sentence about who you are. That is the whole job. A visitor should learn when to turn up without scrolling.
Plan your visit. The most valuable page on a church website and the one most churches skip. Answer the questions people feel awkward asking: what time is it and how long does it run, what do people wear, where do I park and which door, what happens to my kids, will I be singled out, is there something afterwards.
About. What you believe, in plain words, and who leads. If your denomination or tradition matters, say so clearly. People are trying to work out whether they will fit.
Sermons or messages, if you record them.
Give, linked to whatever platform you already use.
That is a complete church website. Everything else is optional.
Write the visit page like a person
The difference between a page that works and one that does not is usually candor.
"Most people wear jeans. A few wear suits. Nobody will look at you either way" tells somebody more than three paragraphs about welcoming community. Write the sentences you would say to a nervous friend in the car park.
Get the service time right, everywhere
The single most common failure on church websites is a service time that changed for summer and only got updated in one of the four places it appears.
Keep it in as few places as possible. On a Swiftrics site, your name, address, service times and phone go into a business profile once and the site uses them everywhere, so there is one thing to update rather than four.
Sermons, if you post them
Give each one its own page with a real title and a paragraph describing what it covers. A sermon buried inside a video playlist is invisible; a sermon with a title and a description is something a person can find at eleven at night when they search the thing they are worried about.
You do not need a media platform. A page with an embedded video and a few paragraphs is enough.
Getting found
Two things do most of the work.
Your Google Business Profile. Free, and for a local organization it is worth more than your website. Fill in every field, especially service times and photos you took recently.
Your town on the page. Somebody searching for a church in your area should find words on your site that match what they typed. Name the town and the neighborhood plainly.
Both are covered in more depth in local SEO for small business, which applies to churches as much as to businesses.
What it costs
A Swiftrics site is nineteen dollars a month including your domain, hosting and the SSL certificate.
Said plainly: if that is genuinely difficult for your congregation, one of the big free builders will host a simple church site at no cost and nobody will think less of you. What matters far more than the platform is that two people can update the service time without calling for help.
The order to do it in
Pick your two editors. Write the visit page. Get the service times right. Fill in the Google Business Profile. Everything after that is improvement rather than foundation.
We wrote more about the platform side of this on our page about church websites.