Maintaining a church website can be challenging. Showing an online presence, displaying church sermons, managing media, and keeping an up-to-date donation system, all require a lot of hard work.
Luckily, if you are building your website using WordPress, you’re doing the right thing.
Combination of a good theme and a great WordPress church plugin will bring your workload down. Giving you more time to do the things that really matter for the church community.
I personally like themes like Kadence or GeneratePress to build my websites. There are some other popular themes too like Astra, Blocksy and so on which you can trust.
While plugins like Advanced Sermons, Events Calendar, Sermon Manager, etc. are extremely good, and easy to set up.
In this post we are going to look at 5 best WordPress church plugins that help you easily administer a church website while improving the lives of your church congregation.
Best WordPress Church Plugins
If you don’t use a plugin, you’ll have to upload your sermons as regular posts and deal with formatting issues.
You might also have to rely on paper flyers instead of just posting church events on your site.
Basically not having the right type of WordPress church plugin can make your WordPress church management system very difficult.
But, you do not need to worry. I have compiled a list of 5 church plugins that ease your WordPress church management system.
Advanced Sermons
Advanced Sermons, by WP Codeus is a modern and beautiful plugin that integrates with any WordPress theme.
It comes with a very easy to use interface allowing you to add audio as well video church sermons to your website.
Plus, the filter options work great in the back end for common WordPress website user; allowing total control by any staff member or volunteer.
Highlights of Advanced Sermons plugin are;
- Allows members to watch or listen to sermons anytime.
- Reach more congregants who couldn’t attend regular worship.
- Add notes, track views, and display sermons in a sleek Grid View.
- Customize sermon appearance with over 80 design modules and custom CSS.
- Enjoy a whole range of cool features with the Advanced Sermons plugin.
The pro version comes with even more powerful features like shortcodes and social sharing options right from the page itself.
Events Calendar
This WordPress plugin is the go to calendering solution with more than 800,000+ active installs, it is helping church website administrators, events websites, annual meetup sites, etc.
Showcase your weekly worship services, scripture studies, and other multiple prayer meetings.
Plus, its ‘Series’ feature can actually group events together while displaying multiple details to your congregation.
With its new virtual events add-on feature, The Events Calendar has become even more popular in the post-covid era. Helping people with hybrid worship services.
Moreover, this plugin helps you embed your live Facebook or YouTube streams right into your website.
Highlights of The Events Calendar Plugin
- Very popular with 800,000+ active installs on the WP.org website.
- Perfect choice for churches and events websites
- Allows grouping of events under ‘Series’ feature
- Virtual events add-on brings in the concept of hybrid worship
- Embed your social media streams
Sermon Manager
The Sermon Manager, by WP for Church is another lightweight and useful church plugin that eases your WordPress church management system.
As the name says, Sermon Manager is great for managing your church sermons and displaying them in order.
The good part about this is that those who’ve missed the service can still catch up by re-listening or re-watching your previous sermons.
Sermon Manager is a completely free to use plugin.
Plus, it is SEO-friendly and also offers in-built support to admins.
Sermon Manager integrates very well with popular page builders like Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, and WP Bakery.
The Sermon Manager plugin supports popular shortcodes like;
- [sermons] – listing 10 recent sermons
- [sermons per_page=”20”] – lists 20 recent sermons
- [sermons_images] – listing sermons with their images
- [list_podcasts] – Lists available podcast services
- [list_sermons] – displays all series
- [latest_series] – shows information about sermon series with image and title
- [sermon_sort_fields] – gives you a dropdown selection to quickly navigate through all sermons
Highlights of Sermon Manager
- Publish written sermons quickly.
- Attach audio and embed videos.
- Sort sermons by topics, speakers, and books.
- Add Bible references using Bib.ly
- Built-in podcasting support
Church Content
The Church Admin plugin is a reliable solution for all your WordPress church management systems.
Be any WordPress theme, it can be easily integrated into your website.
The plugin offers user-friendly tools to facilitate the integration and follow-up of visitors, as well as customizable sign-up forms that can be utilized to populate the church address list and initiate the process of organizing church affairs.
Send messages via email, SMS, and push notifications to all your church congregation.
Using the Church Admin plugin, you can easily administer, communicate, and organize all your church activities.
Highlights of the Church Admin plugin
- Schedule everything and arrange booking for classes
- Add address directory, email and SMS groups
- Create members and small groups easily
- Manage facilities and their bookings
- Includes attendance tracking, ministries, Sunday rota, kids work, etc.
GiveWP
Give WP is an excellent plugin, specially made for managing donations and fundraising for church activities.
It makes online donations and gifting much easier to manage.
The free version itself comes with advanced features like donation forms, reports, donation management, etc.
There isn’t the need to redirect your donors to another site for making donations. With Give WP, you can manage all kinds of donations via your website itself.
The premium version of Give WP comes with more payment options, monthly recurring donations, and a top-notch support system.
Highlights of Give WP
- Used by more than 100,000 users
- Offers tax-deductible receipts to donors
- Measurable fundraising reports
- Well optimized donation forms
- Display as widget, via shortcode, or as a block
- Supports PayPal and Stripe integration
Conclusion
I hope that you found at least one of the WordPress church plugins to be useful in managing your church website more efficiently.
Some of the plugins share similar features, it’s essential to select the one that best suits your specific requirements.
Some themes offer certain features that make your WordPress church management system effective, while others offer a blank canvas.
But, the good news is that most of the plugins are available for free, allowing you to test them out on your website without any financial commitment.
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