Web Hosting for Churches

Short answer: a church website is a small site maintained by a volunteer, and the hosting decisions that matter are keeping livestream video off your server, taking giving through a platform rather than a plugin, and making sure the next person can get in. If you are a registered charity, you should not be paying commercial rates.

Looking for plans rather than guidance? Our charity and non-profit plans are discounted and include a free domain for new charity accounts.

Do not host the livestream yourself

If you stream services, the video does not belong on your web server. Shared hosting is not built to stream, an hour-long service is a very large file, and a congregation member on a slow connection will get buffering rather than a service.

Use YouTube, Vimeo or a church streaming platform and embed it. It adapts to the viewer’s connection, costs you nothing in bandwidth, and handles the archive of past services that would otherwise fill your storage within a year.

Giving belongs on a platform

Online giving is now how most regular donations arrive, and it should not run through your website. Use an established giving platform, the Parish Giving Scheme where relevant, or a payment provider.

Building donations into the site means holding payment data and maintaining something a volunteer will not be able to fix. A platform handles Gift Aid, recurring gifts and reconciliation properly.

Hall hire is the form that earns money

For many churches the hall is the largest income line, and those enquiries arrive by form. A silently failing form is genuinely costly: it submits, the visitor sees a confirmation, the email never arrives, and nothing looks broken.

• Send form mail through authenticated SMTP rather than PHP mail
• Add SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to your domain
• Deliver to a shared church address checked regularly, not a volunteer’s personal inbox
• Test it monthly from a different device

Our guides to contact forms not sending emails and SPF, DKIM and DMARC cover both. Email on your own domain rather than a personal address also matters here: our email hosting plans include unlimited mailboxes, so the office, the incumbent and the hall bookings secretary can each have one.

Your congregation makes page weight matter

Your visitors skew older than almost any organisation covered here, which means larger text settings, magnification and older devices are common. All of that is slower on a heavy page, and text enlarged to 200% will break a layout never tested that way.

Keep the theme light, use page caching, and resize photographs before uploading. Publish orders of service and newsletters as web pages or properly generated PDFs rather than scans, which are unreadable by a screen reader. Our plain English guide to Core Web Vitals covers how speed is measured.

Photographs of the congregation, and the file that stays

Deleting an image from a page does not remove the file. It stays in the media library at its original URL, still reachable, and in your backups. Delete the file itself and clear any CDN cache.

Worth knowing before someone asks for a photograph of their child to be taken down.

Build for handover

Whoever maintains the site now will not be maintaining it in three years. Register the domain in the church or PCC’s name with a shared contact address, pay from church funds rather than a personal card, set auto-renew, and make sure at least two people can log in.

Keep the site simple enough that a new volunteer can update service times without training. Daily backups mean a mistaken edit is a five-minute restore. Our complete guide to UK domain names covers registration and renewals.

What plan you actually need

Entry-level shared hosting, with video and giving on external platforms. SSD storage, a CDN, free SSL, daily backups, mailboxes on your own domain.

Cost predictability matters, because a PCC sets a budget annually and a renewal price that doubles is a real problem. Check the renewal figure, not the introductory rate. If you are a registered charity, our charity plans are cheaper than the standard £39 a year; our guide to cheap web hosting in the UK covers what should be included as standard.

Frequently asked questions

Can we host our service recordings on our website?

No. Use YouTube, Vimeo or a church streaming platform. Self-hosted video buffers and will exhaust your storage.

Should giving run through our website?

Use a giving platform. It handles Gift Aid and recurring donations, and keeps payment data off a site a volunteer maintains.

Is there discounted hosting for churches?

Usually yes if you are a registered charity, though few providers advertise it. Ask before paying commercial rates.

How do we stop the site dying when the volunteer moves on?

Register the domain to the church with a shared contact address, pay from church funds, and make sure two people can log in.

Explore more

For the requirements shared with other volunteer-run organisations, see our guide to web hosting for clubs and community groups, and our guide to charity WordPress hosting covers the discounted route.

Our charity and non-profit plans are the place to start, with a free trial if you want to test first.