We’re constantly trying to find ways to help you save time. If you’re short-staffed (as most churches are), you might have found that it’s difficult to get your sermons published every week. Maybe getting them posted on YouTube is all you have time for.
We know that adding sermons to your website is vital. Here are a few reasons why:
- People search for things they are struggling with spiritually. Your sermons might help them find the help they are looking for. Making sure you have sermons published on your website makes your website a resource for people who are searching for Jesus.
- Sermons give your website more value to users. Regular worship experiences are one of the most critical things we do as churches. It’s incredibly valuable to your internal faith community, so why not make sure that when your people are on your website, they see the latest sermons right there, ready to be watched (or re-watched or shared)?
- More content gives your website more value to search engines. Aside from the actual content that people search for, when search engines see that you are publishing content regularly, that can contribute to a higher level of credibility within their algorithm. That means that you have a better chance of being found for unrelated searches, (like “churches near me”) which gives your church greater visibility overall.
- It makes your website more interactive and sharable. People like to share things they find as valuable online. You spend so much time writing your sermons, so you should do everything you can to leverage their value. Create a culture among your people of sharing sermons from your church website. Then, when the friends they are sharing with are ready to come to an event or plan a visit for a Sunday, everything they need is already available in a place they are familiar with: your church website.
Those are just a few simple reasons why sermon publishing is so important to the content strategy of your church website. But like we said earlier, who has time for that?
We decided that for some of you, it might be nice if you could just set up an automatic connection to your YouTube channel. Something that made it so every time you published a new video on your channel, it showed up as a sermon on your website. We decided it was time to build it into our new sermon plugin.
🎉 We’re proud to announce that all new sites are now able to automatically publish sermons from their YouTube channel!
To achieve that, we had to build a new sermon plugin for our system that included the new code. That new sermon code also affects the Live Stream settings, so we can’t just force activate it on everyone’s website (without messing up some other stuff). All new sites have this new feature by default! But if you started building your site before today (October 4th, 2021), then you’ll need to reach out to us via chat, so we can manually activate this feature on your website and make sure your Live Stream is still functioning properly.
Keep an eye out for some help guides that will hit our Support Center soon that will explain how to set this up for your website as well.