Church Digital

Free tool · No email required · ~30 seconds

Grade your church website — free, instant, no email required

Eight checks, weighted by what matters to a first-time visitor, benchmarked against our national study of 2,000 church websites. See how 1,930 church sites scored.

Enter your church website address

The live grader needs JavaScript — but the national benchmarks for all eight checks are right below either way.

The eight checks

National numbers come straight from our published study of 1,930 reachable church websites. Grade your site and your results appear alongside them.

Online giving works

—/20 pts

Grade a site to see your result here.

Your site—
Churches nationwide67.3%

67.3% of 1,930 church sites nationwide have a giving link that actually resolves.

What this means

We look for a give/donate/tithe link and then follow it to confirm the destination actually loads. A giving link that 404s or never existed is the single most expensive quiet problem a church site can have — someone moved to give on a Tuesday night simply can’t. In our study, roughly a third of church sites had no working giving path.

Signs of life this year

—/20 pts

Grade a site to see your result here.

Your site—
Churches nationwide74%

74% of church sites nationwide show evidence of an update within the last year.

What this means

We look for dated evidence that the site has been touched in the past 365 days: dated posts or events, sitemap last-modified stamps, server headers, or a current copyright year. A visitor deciding between churches reads a stale site as "maybe they’ve stopped meeting" — even when the church is thriving. (A copyright year that’s only one year behind counts as ambiguous, not stale — same rule as our study.)

Service times findable

—/15 pts

Grade a site to see your result here.

Your site—
Churches nationwide83.8%

83.8% of church sites nationwide have findable service times on their main pages.

What this means

The number-one thing a first-time visitor needs. We scan your homepage and key pages for a time of day near words like "Sunday," "service," or "worship" — the same automated proxy our 2,000-church study used, which agreed with human-verified checks on 96.4% of sites. If we missed yours, it may be locked inside an image or a PDF — which is exactly where visitors and Google can’t read it either.

Secure connection (HTTPS)

—/10 pts

Grade a site to see your result here.

Your site—
Churches nationwide94.8%

94.8% of church sites nationwide load over a secure connection.

What this means

HTTPS is the padlock in the browser bar. Without it, browsers label your site "Not secure" — a hard first impression for a church asking people to trust it with giving. Most hosts now include this free; it’s usually a setting, not a rebuild.

Mobile-ready viewport

—/10 pts

Grade a site to see your result here.

Your site—
Churches nationwide94%

94% of church sites nationwide declare a mobile viewport.

What this means

The viewport meta tag is the basic signal that a site is built to scale on a phone. Most people checking out a church do it from a phone — often from a pew, a parking lot, or a friend’s kitchen table. Without this tag, they get a shrunken desktop page and pinch-zoom.

Search basics (title, description, headings)

—/10 pts

Grade a site to see your result here.

Your site—
Churches nationwide70%

70% is the national average across the five basics (title, meta description, single H1, Open Graph title, favicon).

What this means

Five small signals Google and social platforms read first: a page title, a meta description, exactly one main heading (H1), an Open Graph title (what shows when someone shares your site in a text or on Facebook), and a favicon. Each is a small fix; together they decide how your church shows up in "churches near me."

Easy to contact

—/10 pts

Grade a site to see your result here.

Your site—
Churches nationwide75%

75% is the national average across the three signals (phone, email, street address).

What this means

We check for three things on your pages: a phone number, an email address, and a street address. A visitor who can’t find your address can’t show up Sunday; one who can’t find a phone or email won’t ask. All three belong in your footer, on every page.

Image descriptions (accessibility)

—/5 pts

Grade a site to see your result here.

Your site—
Churches nationwide40%

40% is the national median alt-text coverage on church sites (and only 23.7% of sites reach 80%+).

What this means

Alt text is the written description screen readers speak aloud for members and visitors who are blind or low-vision — and it’s also how search engines understand your photos. This is a proxy check (we measure the share of images that carry a non-empty alt attribute), but it correlates strongly with overall accessibility care.

Want the human version?

The grader reads code. Logan watches your site the way a first-time visitor would and records a free 10-minute video review — what’s working, what’s costing you visitors, and what to fix first. No credit card, no sales call.

Get your free video review

Or see how 1,930 church sites scored in the full study.

How the grading works

We fetch your homepage and up to three key pages (visit, giving, about — the pages a first-time visitor actually opens), exactly the way our 2,000-church national study crawled its sample: the same checks, the same honest automated proxies, the same respect for your robots.txt. Sites that ask not to be crawled aren’t graded — we tell you that instead.

The score is weighted by what moves a visitor: working giving (20), signs of life this year (20), findable service times (15), HTTPS (10), mobile viewport (10), search basics (10), contact info (10), and image descriptions (5). Same site, same score, every time — there’s no randomness and no grading on a curve.

It grades honestly, not perfectly. An automated audit can miss service times hidden in an image (in our study the automated check agreed with human verification on 96.4% of sites) — which is usually a sign visitors and Google miss them too.

Questions pastors ask

Is it really free? Do I have to give you my email?
Really free, and no — no email, no account, no credit card. Type a web address, get a grade. We built it because our 2,000-church study showed most church sites have two or three fixable gaps, and a pastor deserves to see their own site’s gaps without surrendering an inbox for it.
What exactly do you check?
Eight things, weighted by how much they matter to a first-time visitor: a working online giving link (20 points), evidence the site was updated this year (20), findable service times (15), a secure HTTPS connection (10), a mobile-ready viewport (10), five search basics like your page title and description (10), contact info — phone, email, street address (10), and image alt-text coverage as an accessibility proxy (5). We fetch your homepage and up to three key pages, the same way our national study crawled 2,000 church sites.
How accurate is it?
It’s an automated audit, so it’s honest about its limits. The service-times check is a text-pattern proxy — in our study it agreed with human-verified results on 96.4% of sites, which means it occasionally misses times hidden in images or PDFs (which is itself a finding: visitors and Google miss them too). The giving check actually follows your giving link and confirms the destination loads. Full methodology is published with the study on our research page.
Do you store my results?
We log the domain you graded, the score, and the letter grade — that’s the whole record. No page content is stored, no personal information is collected, and we never publish individual results (the same aggregate-only policy as our research study). The audit reads your public pages once, respects your robots.txt, and identifies itself honestly in its user-agent.