It’s no secret that we believe WordPress is the best website platform for churches.
And one of the reasons it’s our first choice is because of the flexibility offered by WordPress plugins for churches.
But not all plugins are created equal.
Here’s our list of the top eight plugins that every church website needs to include.
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The Best WordPress Plugins For Churches
Yoast
First on our list is Yoast. Simply put, Yoast is the best SEO tool, not only for WordPress but for any website platform.
It used to be that doing search engine optimization took a lot of technical skill, but Yoast makes it easy.
It handles both global SEO on your site and granular optimization on individual pages and sermons.
Each post uses a simple red, orange, and green light system to help you see where your content needs work to make it ready for the web.
Facebook for WordPress
The chances are that your church is on Facebook. (You are on Facebook, right?)
The Facebook for WordPress plugin helps you pull data from your site and enables you to make improvements to your Facebook content. This is especially useful for ads.
This is done through a Facebook pixel. A pixel is a tool that communicates what happens on your website back to Facebook.
If your church is running ads for an event on Facebook, you can use the pixel to let Facebook know who is signing up for the event. Facebook can then take that info and show your event to more people like those who have already signed up.
This piece of code can 10x your advertising results on Facebook and Instagram.
Sermon Manager
Every church website needs a way to handle sermons, and we think the best way is with Sermon Manager by WP for Church.
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The plugin makes adding both audio and video sermons to your site a breeze.
Best of all, it lets you easily categorize sermons by topic, preacher, book of the bible, and series, so every sermon you load up is easy to find for years to come.
The Events Calendar
Our favorite tool for church events is The Events Calendar, and the free version is enough to meet the needs of most churches.
With this plugin, creating and managing one-time and recurring events is a piece of cake.
Each event has space for an event image which makes them very social media-friendly.
Akismet
Everyone hates spam. As your church website grows and sees more visitors, you will naturally see more and more spam.
Akismet has you covered. It is hands down the best spam filter you can use and that makes it one of the most important WordPress plugins for churches.
For the REACHRIGHT site, Akismet has blocked 27,118 spam messages without our team ever having to see them. And that’s just in the last six months. Dealing with spam takes time, and they estimate that saved us 15 days of work!
Gravity Forms
Every week we seem to come back to the importance of calling people to action on your website. The best way to do that in most cases is through a form.
The best form system you can use is Gravity Forms.
This plugin lets you add unlimited forms to your WordPress website. You can do just about anything with those forms, and they will help people in your church take their next right step.
MonsterInsights
It’s been said that in church, you get what you measure.
MonsterInsights is the best tool for measuring what’s happening on your website.
The plugin helps you by connecting your WordPress website with Google Analytics. It then takes that info from Google Analytics and breaks it down into easy-to-understand charts and lists.
If you want to see your web presence improve, you must learn from what you have done in the past.
Smush
Finally, we have Smush. This plugin takes images you load into WordPress and shrinks them to make them more web-friendly.
Your website should be full of images, and optimizing each picture you load onto the site can take a long time.
With Smush, you no longer need to worry about image sizes. The plugin does it all for you.
