Plugins for Your Church

Over the years I’ve made quite a few sites for churches, and now that I have a portfolio full of WordPress themes for churches, people ask me all the time what plugins I use and recommend for their church sites. To help everyone out, I’ve put together this updated list of what plugins I would recommend for your church site.

All in SEO

This is the most used WordPress plugin and for good reason. It easily adds descriptions and keywords to your site’s content and attempts to make the entire site more search engine friendly. I use it on every site that I set up and think everyone who wants their site to be noticed should too. I will say lately the plugin has begun to have more frequent updates without appearing to change anything and each update requires visiting the settings page to reactivate it. A bit annoying, but I suspect it helps the developer get a few more donations. That’s not too bad considering the plugin is free. You can find out more here.

XML Sitemaps

This another plugin geared to help your site be noticed by search engines. It creates a map to show Google and everyone else where your content is located. It’s a breeze to set up and quietly does its job without getting in your way. Find out more and download it here.

MapPress

I’ve yet to make a church site that didn’t have some form of map and most of them use Google maps to provide directions as well as a visual. While it’s not hard to embed a Google map, it’s generally not very graceful. Now there is a great WordPress plugin called MapPress that will allow you to not only embed a map, but offer directions via Google directly in your site. It’s a great solution. Learn more and download it here.

Gravity Forms

Most every church needs some type of contact form, even if it is just for sending a basic message. But contact forms have so much more benefit to churches than just sending in prayer requests. Gravity Forms is by far the best plugin for forms available. Since it’s release this summer, I’ve replaced every contact form on my sites with this elegant solution. Now I can easily create small group sign ups. Allow people to write posts that the church can later publish. I work with a mentoring ministry that is using this plugin to collect information on new mentors. Once the mentor is approved, the data doesn’t have to be re-entered. All that is required is to publish the post the form creates. It’s a great solution that I would recommend to anyone looking for a form. Learn more and purchase it here.

Podcasting

Most churches that use WordPress want to publish a podcast of their messages. While WordPress creates a feed that will work with iTunes, it’s not obvious as to how to add descriptions, categories and images for the iTunes store to use. Podcasting steps in and allows you to easily add those items, plus create posts from any category to include in your podcast feed. The plugin is easy to use and is a fix and forget it solution. You can find it here.

MailChimp

Most churches use email newsletters as a means to communicate. While there are many companies out there you can use, I really like MailChimp. They provide a great set of tools that are constantly being improved. They have great looking templates, or you can create your own. Plus the best part is their mailing list is free for up to 500 users and 6 email campaigns per month. For many churches that will be all they need. Plus if you exceed that amount, their prices are more than competitive. They also provide another great plugin called Analytics360 that provides an great view on your Google Analytics data that charts how your email campaigns and posts affect your traffic. You can download Analytics 360here and MailChimp’s sign up here.

Google Analyticator

You have to keep track of visitors to your site, otherwise you’ll never know if you are being successful or not. There are lots of plugins that can add analytics features to your site, but I like Google Analyticator because it allows you to remove logged in administrators from the tracking. That way you’re only seeing true visitors and not just yourself. Plus it conveniently adds a dashboard widget to show you recent visitors. As an added bonus, this graph isn’t Flash so you can see it even if you view your dashboard from an iPhone. You can download Google Analyticator here.

WPTouch iPhone Theme

Mobile devices are here to stay and people expect to be able to view your site from their phones. Personally I believe this is especially true of any place that has a physical location that people visit like a church. If someone is in traffic and they see a bumper sticker with your church’s website on it, they may just look it up while they wait at a red light. If you site can’t be viewed on their phone, they’re not going to bother with it. The WPTouch plugin allows you to easily create a mobile device compatible version of your site. This is a mature plugin that is updated frequently. There are other alternatives out there or you could just make your own, but this is so simple and effective why bother. You can download it here.

So these are the plugins that I always use with a church’s website. Did I leave any of your favorites out? Leave a comment so we can all discover some more great resources.