3 Surefire Ways Your Church’s Website Can Make A Great First Impression

Brady Shearer: Pro Church Daily is brought to you by Nucleus, a new kind of website builder for churches from single click templates to advanced integrations. Nucleus is unlike anything else. Nucleus opens on March 20th. Head to nucleus.church to join the launch list. Why just have a website when you could have a Nucleus?

Alex Mills: Well, hey there, and welcome to Pro Church Daily, the show where in 10 minutes or less, you’ll get your daily dose of tips and tactics to help your church share the message of Jesus while we navigate the biggest communication shift we’ve seen in the last 500 years. I’m your host, Alex Mills. I’m joined, as always, by the boss man. It’s Brady Shearer, and today, we’re talking about three surefire ways your church’s website can make a great first impression.

Brady Shearer: In episode number 37 of Pro Church Daily, we talked about how the most important marketing tool your church has at its disposal, in its arsenal, in its possession-

Alex Mills: Yes.

Brady Shearer: … is your church’s website.

Alex Mills: Of course.

Brady Shearer: In episode 56 of Pro Church Daily, we talked about how the number one goal of your website should be to make a great first impression. So building upon that foundational knowledge-

Alex Mills: How do we do it?

Brady Shearer: Let’s talk about three surefire ways to make this happen. The first one is inspirational imagery. In a study of first impressions that was conducted on travel websites, tourist sites, the research found that inspiration-related elements had the greatest impact on first impressions. So for instance, it would be one thing to hit a travel … hit a tourism website and see a computer where you could search all the different places that you could go. Accurate. Not exactly inspiring.

Alex Mills: You’re right.

Brady Shearer: Well, actually, what turned out to be much better would be a couple holding hands, walking on a sandy beach, blue skies.

Alex Mills: So inspired.

Brady Shearer: That makes a great first impression.

Alex Mills: Yeah.

Brady Shearer: So similarly, reverse engineering that understanding of human behavior when it comes to first impressions, what kind of inspirational imagery can your church use to make a great first impression? Maybe it’s raised hands in service. Maybe it’s smiling photos of human faces.

Alex Mills: Of course.

Brady Shearer: Maybe it’s the kids’ ministry, showing we’re a family-centered, community-oriented church. And this is why, in the Nucleus framework, at the top of the page, we have these two huge image containers so you can put this big hero image kind of in the background and a main hero image in the center just so that in that first 0.05 seconds when a first impression is made, you can do it with inspirational imagery. And we give you in the Nucleus framework, in the church website builder of Nucleus, those two huge containers to do it. The second big surefire way to make a great first impression is to prioritize design on your website rather than usability. A study found that attractive sites are more likely to pull in users than unattractive sites, a groundbreaking study.

Alex Mills: Yeah.

Brady Shearer: But here’s where things get a little more interesting. Regardless of how well they are designed from a usability standpoint, this study confirmed that even a site with amazing usability … if it was unattractive, users did not show as much interest in it.

Alex Mills: Wow.

Brady Shearer: And so this is where … obviously, when it comes to web design, functionality is just as important when it comes to actually making conversions and long-term wins as design. But if you can’t get past that initial first impression, you’ll never get-

Alex Mills: Yeah, it won’t ever matter.

Brady Shearer: … to the usability part.

Alex Mills: Right.

Brady Shearer: And there’s more study to back this up. In a study by researchers from Northumbria University, the study revealed that the look and feel of a website is the overwhelming main driver of first impressions. Of all of the feedback they got from this study, 94% was design-related. The participants would say stuff like, “This website’s too complex, or it’s too busy.”

Alex Mills: Yeah.

Brady Shearer: “The navigation doesn’t work very well. There’s too much text. It feels too corporate.” 94% of the responses. The truth is, the average person pays far more attention to the superficial aspects of a website than the actual content itself. And of course, when we hear that, we go, “People are so shallow, judging a book by its cover.” But in a separate study by Stanford researchers, they found that what people say about how we evaluate websites is very different than what we actually do, right?

Alex Mills: Right.

Brady Shearer: None of us want to believe that we judge books by their cover.

Alex Mills: But we all do it.

Brady Shearer: Facts. And that’s what’s important to understand. Finally, research from Google found that users love designs that are simple and familiar, with low visual complexity.

Alex Mills: Yeah.

Brady Shearer: So you want your website to be minimal. This isn’t a design trend. A lot of the times, we’ll have pastors push back. Like, for instance, they’ll say, “I don’t really like that minimal look.” And it’s okay that you don’t like something, but you have to ask yourself, is your church’s website for you? Or is it for your audience? And we all know the answer is for your audience.

Alex Mills: Of course.

Brady Shearer: But if you’re unwilling to kind of set aside your own personal preferences for the sake of reaching people using data from multiple studies, Stanford and Google … if you want to say Stanford and Google are wrong, and you need a slider with 18 call to action buttons, you just got to admit that you’re doing this for you and not for your audience. And that’s okay, but just don’t think that you’re going to work around these things. At the end of the day … I mean, if there’s anyone who’s been building websites for a really long time, that would be us. But we still rely on the data from the experts saying, “Okay, what works?” That’s what we’re going to use.

Alex Mills: Yeah.

Brady Shearer: Because I don’t want to go off a hunch. I don’t want to go off my emotional or even my own stylistic preferences.

Alex Mills: Right.

Brady Shearer: I want to go off what I know will work. Simple, familiar, low visual complexity, imagery. These are the things that make great first impressions.

Alex Mills: Nice.

Brady Shearer: Final thing … third surefire way to make a great first impression with your church’s website is to ensure your site has a fast load time, and nearly half of web users expect a website to load in two seconds or less. If it’s any slower … let’s say it loads within three seconds. Half of those users will abandon that load time, according to Kissmetrics. Nucleus … we did a case study of more than 1,000 church websites, and we found that 38% of church websites fail the speed test.

Alex Mills: Wow.

Brady Shearer: So about 4 in 10. So the majority are loading quickly enough, which is great. But 4 out of 10 we can still improve, so if you want to test your own church’s website with load times, head to the Pingdom Website Speed Test.

Alex Mills: Yes.

Brady Shearer: You can just Google that. Pingdom, like kingdom with a P. Pingdom Website Speed Test. You just paste your URL in there, test it, and it’ll tell you, “Hey, this is how fast your website loads. Here’s a grade. Here’s a number out of 100. Here’s a letter grade. Here’s what you can improve. Here’s what’s working well,” because speed doesn’t only affect the way that a user perceives your website, but it also affects search ranking, because Google doesn’t want to send their users to a website that loads slowly. And so they will penalize you for a site that isn’t optimized speed-wise. So those are the three things. Number one, inspirational imagery. Number two, prioritize design, not usability. Simple, familiar, low visual complexity. Read, minimalism. And three, quick load times.

Alex Mills: I love these, because they’re very practical and very actionable. The first one … just replace text box with images or prioritize images more in your home page. That’s simple. The third one, is your site loading fast enough? If not, there are ways to improve that. The second one may take a little more time. Maybe your site is very complex and you have to do a full overhaul, but the good news is, a site with low visual complexity is more appealing to users.

So you actually want less on your site, so it’s not like you have to go and do a bunch of design work. You actually want … you want to trend towards a more minimalistic trend, and so that’s actually good news. You can actually remove some things from your site. But these things are super practical. You can evaluate your site right now and start to take action and begin to make better first impressions on people who are looking for your church and want to know what your church is about.

Brady Shearer: Also, we don’t want to understate the difficulty of making tough decisions on a website.

Alex Mills: Yeah.

Brady Shearer: There’s a reason why 80% of church website themes have sliders at the top of the page, because these website theme builders know that churches don’t want to make the hard decision of deciding what goes on the home page and what doesn’t. I got a DM today from a pastor, and he’s like, “I’m totally sold on this idea of the big main headline on a website. How do I make it so that every time the page refreshes, we show one of three different headlines?” Because he’s like, “I want to make sure I cover all my bases.” And I understand where you’re coming from in that respect. Like, I don’t want to miss anything, and that’s the idea of the slider, too. We’ve talked a ton about those.

Alex Mills: Right.

Brady Shearer: So we don’t need to redo all that, but what’s cool about a slider, ideally, is that you get to show everything. And that way, you won’t miss anything.

Alex Mills: Right.

Brady Shearer: Well, that’s just not the way that it works in practice, and so there’s a reason Mark Twain wrote that quote, or is at least attributed that quote. “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long letter instead.” It takes more time to be minimal and to cut down. In the Nucleus framework, we have put together this simplistic, familiar design. Low visual complexity. And we’re like, “Okay, fill it with images and with your cards that you want, but we’re going to limit the complexity so that you don’t.” You don’t even have the possibility to over do this.

Alex Mills: Yeah.

Brady Shearer: Now, there’s a ton more additional resources that you can read about this at the Nucleus blog. You can read about the five part first impression case study we did of more than 1,000 church websites. Blog.nucleus.church, we have an article in there called The 11 Step Church Homepage Formula. So if you’re like, “What should be on my home page?” Here are the absolute things that you need to have, so check that out, blog.nucleus.church, to read more on all of this stuff. That’ll do it for today’s episode of Pro Church Daily. We’ll see you tomorrow.

Hey, thanks for listening to today’s episode of Pro Church Daily. If you haven’t already, head to prochurchtools.com/nucleus to download our ultimate library of church website page templates, pre-written copy structured the exact way we would do if we had these pages on our websites. Prochurchtools.com/nucleus is the place to download those.