Our church website looks old. What now?

Is the problem the design or the content?

Usually the content. A visitor forgives a plain design and does not forgive a wrong service time, a staff member who left two years ago, or an event calendar whose last entry is from last spring.

Check the dates on the site before anything else. If the newest thing on it is over a year old, no redesign will fix what that communicates.

Correcting content is a few hours of work. It is the cheapest fix available and the one most often mistaken for needing a rebuild.

Is it too slow?

Test on a phone using mobile data, not church wifi. Anything over about 2.5 seconds to show the main content loses a meaningful share of visitors.

The usual cause is photographs uploaded straight from a camera. A single image can be 4 to 8 megabytes where 200 kilobytes would look identical on screen, and resizing plus converting to WebP typically removes 70 to 90 percent of page weight.

Does it work on phones?

This is the check that decides repair against rebuild. If the whole page shrinks and you have to zoom to read anything, the layout is fixed-width, which was standard before roughly 2015 and cannot be patched.

A responsive rebuild starts at $2,000 depending on page count. If the site does adapt to the screen and merely looks dated, repair is the better value.

Is it a security risk?

An old WordPress site that has not been updated in years is exploitable, and probably already probed. Church sites are compromised by automated scans rather than deliberate targeting.

Check the WordPress version and when plugins were last updated. A site more than 12 months behind should be treated as a live risk rather than an aesthetic problem, and that changes the priority order entirely.

What does looking dated actually cost?

Less than churches assume, and it is not nothing. A first-time visitor forms an impression in a few seconds, and a site that looks abandoned suggests a congregation that is too.

But the visitor who leaves because the page took 8 seconds never saw the design at all. Fix speed and accuracy first; appearance is the last of the four to pay for.

What is the cheapest useful order?

Content, then speed, then security, then appearance. The first two take hours and produce most of the benefit. The third is urgent if the site is years behind on updates.

Only rebuild when the mobile check fails or the site cannot be maintained. That keeps the money on the problems visitors actually notice.

Frequently asked questions

Written by Bernd Broschek, web developer and founder of Christian Web Designer in Schwaz, Austria, building websites for churches, ministries and Christian organisations since 2015. Last reviewed 24 August 2026.