Since 2016, the diocese has offered a website hosting plan to churches. The plan provides a simple, easy-to-update template to churches who may have few resources and technical abilities to build and maintain a site on their own.

What’s included?

Hosting
– The diocese hosts your church website
– Each church is allotted 1 GB of storage

Initial Set Up

When initial setup is complete, we will point your new site to your domain name, and you’re ready to go!

– Initial set-up and navigation design
– Selecting a domain name, if you don’t yet have one
– Migration of text and media files (including photos)
– An initial training session via Zoom with your staff or volunteers to get you up-to-speed

Ongoing Support
Tech support
Want to make a change you don’t know how to make on your own? Contact us!

Behind-the-scenes updates
WordPress issues updates often. We will track and take care of these as they arise. You’ll be able to rest easy knowing the back-end support is being handled.

Training Refresher training or training of new parish website admins as needed via Zoom

Audit A best practices audit of your website

Basic Web Statistics
WP Statistics Plugin provides basic web traffic information which can be printed from the screen. Advanced reports are not available.

What’s not included?

Email
Email is not part of the website hosting plan. If you would like to use domain-based email (with your .org), you would be able to purchase email from another hosting company fairly inexpensively or set yourself up with (free for nonprofits) Google Workspace.

Many churches have found that their needs may be met with one, centralized free Gmail account for general church email.

Interested? Here’s What We Need from You

Secure Your Domain Name and Manage Renewals Provide us with your credentials for accessing your domain account. Ensure you track and renew your domain name. We’ve had churches lose their domain name by forgetting to renew – don’t let that happen to you!

Use the Provided Templates and Vetted Plugins
We only support templates installed by us. The hosting program does not cover the ongoing maintenance and management of any plugins a church might add on their own. Connect with us first, we’re happy to help.

Update Your Content!
Your site is yours – you can continue to update and customize your site with new updates, text, photos, and to a certain extent, navigation.

Designate a Web Admin
Your web admin will be the one updating content. They don’t need to be a tech expert — we can train them! Going through a transition? Ensure you put us in touch with the new web admin when one steps down or moves on. Be sure the new person has the logins/information that they need.

Attend Training
Your web admin will attend at least one training session with our team each year. We offer both multi-church group training and individual church sessions.

Participate in an Annual Website Audit
Our team will work with you to ensure your site’s content and appearance is up-to-date and following best practices for church websites.