Best website builder for churches

Why we believe Squarespace is the best website builder for churches

Most of the church communications directors and volunteer webmasters I've worked with are managing the site on Tuesday afternoons between a staff meeting and a hospital visit. They don't have bandwidth for a platform that demands constant attention. The right call is the platform that lets a non-technical staff member keep the site current without it becoming a second job. Here's why Squarespace keeps winning that brief.

Where Wix earns the runner-up spot

Wix is the runner-up because there are a handful of churches for whom it is genuinely the better call, not because it's a tight second overall. If one of these scenarios sounds like yours, Wix is worth the look.

A volunteer has already built half a site on Wix

If a well-meaning member spent six months on a Wix site that mostly works, and the pastor is reluctant to throw away that effort, staying and polishing is often the right move. The switching cost (content migration, volunteer morale, staff retraining) can outweigh the gains. Wix will do the job for a church of any reasonable size; it just isn't as opinionated about what a welcoming church page should feel like.

Your giving or management platform has a specific Wix integration

Wix's app market is deeper than Squarespace's extensions catalogue. A handful of church-tech tools have first-party Wix apps that aren't on Squarespace yet. If your church is already committed to a platform that only plays nicely with Wix, don't fight the integration. Stay where the integration lives.

You want the Wix editor's pixel-level control

Wix's editor lets a staff member drag things anywhere on the page. Squarespace is more opinionated, which most communications directors find a relief. If your pastor or comms lead is the one who wants full control over every spacing decision, and they enjoy that kind of work, Wix is probably the better fit for them as a person. The caveat is that a more permissive editor makes it easier to produce a messy site.

There's an honest trade-off to name. Wix's church templates vary wildly; some look contemporary, most feel behind the curve. The editor gives more freedom but also more rope. And the SEO tooling, while improved, still reads like it was designed for a catalogue store rather than a congregation. If you pick Wix, pick it knowing the starting templates probably need more work than Squarespace's do out of the box.

How the other major website builders stack up for churches

Scored 1 to 10 on the factors that matter for a typical congregation (100 to 2,500 weekly attendance, a handful of staff, a volunteer or staff communications lead, occasional traffic spikes around Easter, Christmas, and guest speakers).

Church management, giving, and sermon platforms your site has to talk to

No church website lives on its own. It sits between a church management system (Planning Center, Breeze, Realm), a giving platform (Pushpay, Tithe.ly, EasyTithe), a sermon host (Subsplash, Sermon.ly, YouTube), and a streaming setup for the service itself. Any review of the best website builder for churches has to sit inside that ecosystem rather than pretend the builder is the whole story.

Planning Center, Breeze, and Realm are the three church management platforms I see most often. Planning Center is the operational workhorse for medium and larger churches, Breeze is the pick for smaller congregations that want something friendlier, and Realm leans denominational. All three have embeddable forms and event widgets that drop into Squarespace or Wix without drama. If you're picking a management system from scratch, pick the one your staff will actually use on a Tuesday, because the nicest integration in the world doesn't matter if nobody logs in.

Pushpay, Tithe.ly, and EasyTithe cover most of the giving landscape. Pushpay is the enterprise option, deep integrations and a strong mobile app, usually paired with ChurchStaq or their CMS. Tithe.ly is the nimble, church-plant-friendly choice with a fee structure that works for smaller offerings. EasyTithe sits between them. All three embed into a Squarespace site as a button, a form, or a subdomain, so the website side of the decision is largely "will the button work" (it will) rather than "can we integrate" (yes).

Sermon hosting splits roughly three ways. Most smaller churches embed YouTube or Vimeo and treat the website as a shell. That's fine, and honestly it's what I recommend for any congregation under about 500. For churches that want their sermons discoverable beyond YouTube, Subsplash and Sermon.ly build discipleship features around the audio (series navigation, notes, in-app players). Subsplash also pulls double duty as a church app platform. If you're big enough to have staff dedicated to discipleship content, Subsplash is worth evaluating alongside the website build, not after.

A couple of practical checks when you're stitching this all together. Does the giving button go somewhere your treasurer actually reconciles every week, or has the connection quietly broken? Are service times the same across the website, Google Business Profile, and the church management system, or have they drifted after a service-time change? (Drift is the number-one cause of first-time visitor confusion I've seen.) And does the sermon page auto-populate from YouTube or Vimeo, or is a volunteer manually uploading every Monday? The manual workflow breaks in August every year when someone goes on holiday.

For a useful outside perspective on how churches actually use their websites, Church Tech Today runs honest reviews and practical guides that aren't tied to a single platform vendor. Church Marketing Sucks has been publishing on the messaging side of church communications for years and is worth reading before the templates conversation even starts.

What a church website actually needs to do on Sunday night

Seven features carry the weight. The four "must haves" are what turn a first-time visitor into a second-time visitor. The rest matter in year two, but don't block launch.

Squarespace handles all seven without extra apps. Wix covers six, typically needing a little more configuration on the giving-button integration.

Which Squarespace templates suit churches best

Every Squarespace template runs on Fluid Engine and is broadly interchangeable, so the choice is about starting aesthetic rather than locking in features. These four are the ones church communications teams tend to land on.

Bedford

Classic, grid-driven, with clean space for service times, a hero photo, and a prominent giving button. Works especially well for established congregations that want the site to feel steady and rooted rather than trendy.

Beaumont

Warmer, more image-forward, with room for a short welcome paragraph above the fold. Suits churches that lean into hospitality as the primary brand note. Good for church plants and congregations that feel younger.

Nolan

Editorial feel, space for sermon content and long-form articles alongside the basics. Best for churches that publish written content regularly, whether that's pastoral notes, discipleship essays, or community stories.

Brine family

The workhorse, highly configurable, more variations than any other. Useful when a church has particular structural needs (multi-campus, multi-service-time, a distinct kids' ministry page) that a more opinionated template doesn't accommodate out of the box.

All four handle the checklist above without modification. Template choice is the starting aesthetic, not the feature ceiling, and I'd actively discourage spending weeks deliberating. Pick the one that feels closest to how your congregation already carries itself, launch, revisit after Easter. For a second opinion on matching visual tone to your church's voice, Church Themes writes specifically about what works and what doesn't for church-site design, even if they're mostly WordPress-focused themselves.

Common mistakes churches make picking a builder

One pattern sits above the rest, and it's the one I'd push hardest to avoid. The site becomes whatever the volunteer webmaster is comfortable with, rather than what the church actually needs. Everything below is downstream of that.

Letting the platform be decided by whoever volunteered. If a well-meaning member offered to build a WordPress site because they "knew WordPress" three years ago, and they've since moved out of town or burned out on the role, the church is now stuck with a platform nobody on staff can edit. Pick the platform that any non-technical staff member can maintain on a Tuesday afternoon. Squarespace and Wix both pass that test. A WordPress install with unmaintained plugins usually doesn't.

Burying "new here" under "About us". A first-time visitor isn't reading the history of the congregation. They're trying to work out where to park and what to wear. The "new here" page deserves its own nav item and its own link in the header. Every church I've seen move it out of "About" and into the main nav has seen first-time-visitor return rates go up.

Overbuilding the homepage while the kids' check-in page is blank. I've watched communications teams spend three months perfecting the hero video while the kids' ministry page still says "coming soon". Families with young children decide whether to visit based on that page. Finish it before the hero.

Assuming the website is the front door. Most first-time visitors reach the site through Google Business Profile, not by typing the URL. If the Google Business listing is wrong (old address, old service times, wrong photos), the website is a recovery mission rather than a first impression. Fix the profile first, then the site.

Picking a church-specific builder without a specific reason. Tithely Sites, Nucleus, Ekklesia360, and others exist and have real strengths for large congregations with complex needs. For most churches under a few thousand attendees, they're solving problems you don't have, and the templates are often more dated than Squarespace's. Only reach for a church-specific builder if a concrete feature a general builder can't do is driving the decision.

Christmas, Easter, and the Sundays when the site has to just work

Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday draw the most first-time visitors of the year at nearly every church I've worked with. Attendance roughly doubles, and website traffic triples or quadruples in the week leading up to each. September also deserves attention as a smaller but real spike when families return to weekly routines after summer. A church website that falls over on December 23rd loses the visitors it was built to welcome. A few things tend to decide whether the site survives intact.

Service times have to match everywhere. Holiday services usually have different times, different locations, and sometimes additional campuses. The website, Google Business Profile, church management system, and social media all need to carry the same information. I've seen families show up at 5pm for a service that moved to 4pm because one of those four sources didn't get updated. Do the audit the first week of December and again the first week of Lent.

Kids' check-in details matter more than usual. Easter and Christmas Eve bring families who have never been to the church before, and the first-time check-in process is often the most anxious moment of the visit. A dedicated page with photos, a clear description of the check-in flow, and what happens during the service does more to ease that anxiety than any welcome video.

The giving button still has to work. Year-end giving concentrates into the last ten days of December for most US churches. A giving button that silently breaks on December 28th costs real money and is a small disaster nobody notices until January. Test the full flow, including the confirmation email, the week before Christmas.

Livestream pages need to exist before the service, not during it. If Christmas Eve is the first time your church streams, or the first time you stream at scale, build the livestream page and publish the URL a week in advance. Test it with someone not on staff. A livestream page assembled on Christmas Eve afternoon breaks in ways that are invisible to the person building it and obvious to everyone trying to join.

What I'm less sure about. Honestly, I'm not sure how much longer the YouTube-embed model will be the default for church sermon archives. If YouTube's algorithm keeps pushing congregations toward shorter vertical clips as the way to reach new viewers, a longer-form sermon archive on YouTube may stop doing the work it did three years ago. The bet I'd make today is to keep the archive on YouTube (it's free, it's discoverable, congregations know how to use it), but to also publish audio-only versions in a podcast feed the church owns. That hedges against a future where YouTube's role shifts and the audio archive is the durable asset.

Get the site live before the next visitor tries to find you

The church site doesn't have to be perfect. It has to answer parking, service times, kids, and giving, and it has to not break on Christmas Eve. Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial, and a focused staff member can put up a credible church site, with a new-here page, a sermon archive, and a working giving button, in a couple of evenings. If one of the runner-up cases above fit your congregation, Wix is a fair alternative. Whichever you pick, the site you launch this week is worth more than the perfect site you're still planning.

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Or start with Wix if a volunteer has already built half a site there.