Is your church website turning away potential visitors instead of leading them to your church?
The OurChurch.com team provides free website reviews to anyone who requests one.
It’s one of the ways we live out our mission – to help Christian organizations live out their mission online.
We check for the 10 most common website problems. If a website passes all 10 points, it receives an award. If it fails any of the 10 points, we send a list of recommendations.
Only 14% of websites reviewed last year passed all 10 points of the website review.
We analyzed the data from our website reviews to determine the percentage of websites that fail each of the 10 points. One problem stood out well beyond all the others.
The #1 reason church websites fail website reviews is because of problems with images.
To put this into perspective, the 2nd most common problem was present on 30% of sites. So images problems are at least twice as common as every other problem we see.
We live in a very visual culture. If your website has any of these image problems, people instantly think either you don’t know what you’re doing or you don’t care.
To address and help with this problem, we created this resource: The Ultimate Guide to Church Website Photos
We’re going to do everything we possibly can to help you improve the images on your website so that instead of distracting people from your mission they help you achieve your mission!
When someone visits your church website for the first time, they are trying to answer an important question:
They may read about your beliefs, ministries, worship services, and church history, but long before they read every word on the page, they will notice your photos.
These photos can communicate a great deal about your church. They can show whether your congregation feels warm and welcoming, whether families and children are active in church life, what worship looks like, and how your church serves its community.
That is why choosing photos for a church website should involve more than finding images that simply look good.
The purpose of placing photos on your church website is to show people who you really are.
Think about how you use a website you’ve never visited before.
You probably don’t begin by reading every paragraph from top to bottom. You scan the page. You notice the headline, the layout, the colors, and especially the images.
Someone visiting your church website does the same thing.
They may be wondering what it would feel like to attend on Sunday. Are people friendly? Are there children? What does worship look like? Is the congregation formal or casual? Are people involved in activities outside of Sunday worship?
Your photos can begin answering those questions before visitors ever open your About Us or What We Believe pages.
This is particularly important for people who are considering visiting a church for the first time. Walking into an unfamiliar church can feel intimidating. Seeing authentic photos of the congregation can help remove some of that uncertainty by giving visitors a glimpse of what they can expect.
Let’s talk about the importance of using good quality photos and some specific photos every church website should have.
What’s your first thought when you go to a website that has blurry, dark, over-exposed, or tiny pictures on it?
It’s like wearing a stained t-shirt to a job interview. Poor images give visitors the impression that the people who are a part of the organization are either clueless or don’t care.
It shows a vibrant community of people who are full of life, care about people, and are inviting you to be a part of what they’re doing.
Photos make or break a website.
If you are the administrator of your website and you’re not sure whether the photos on your website are good quality or not, ask someone in your church who has an eye for photography or request a free website review.
Because there are specific things most church website visitors want to know about, there are specific photos every church website should include.
People who are considering a first-time visit to worship with your church want to know what the outside of your church building looks like so they know what to look for when they visit.
Throughout our 30 years of doing church website design, the most common photo we see on church website homepages is a photo of the church building.
But, the outside of a church building by itself is boring and lifeless.
So make sure there are people in the photo – people who are friendly, kind and engaging.
Royalty-free stock photos are all over the internet. But should they be all over your church website?
It’s faster and easier to download a stock photo and put it on a website than it is to take a photo, especially if it involves people who have limited availability.
Also, most stock photos are taken by professional photographers with professional equipment, so the quality of stock photos is often better than the photos your average web admin can take with their phone.
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What is the church?It’s the people, right?
Read more about why genuine photos are important and the exceptions where stock photos can be used in Is it OK to use stock photos on my church website?
4. AI Images for Church Websites: Benefits, Tools & Guidelines
AI image generators have improved dramatically in recent years.
What once produced extra fingers, distorted objects, and obviously fake images can now generate beautiful, realistic-looking images in seconds.
That creates some exciting opportunities for churches.
- Need an image to illustrate a sermon about forgiveness? AI can create one.
- Want an image of an open Bible at sunrise for a blog article? AI can create that too.
- Need a custom visual for an Easter series without spending hours searching stock photo websites? AI may be able to help.
But there is also an important question churches need to consider:
Just because AI can create an image that looks real, should your church use it?
The answer depends largely on what the image is communicating.
Because the topic of AI images is so big, we created an entire guide specifically on AI images.
Ultimate Guide to AI Images for Church Websites
- What Are AI-Generated Images?
- Benefits of Using AI Images on a Church Website
- AI Can Put Graphic Design Capabilities in Anyone’s Hands
- People Are Getting Better at Recognizing AI Images
- Don’t Use AI to Create a False Impression of Your Church
- Use AI to Illustrate, Not Impersonate
- Recommended AI Image Generators for Churches
- How to Write Better AI Image Prompts
- Review and Optimize AI Images Before Publishing
- Keep Authenticity at the Center
Click any of the links to the specific sub-topic you’d like to start with!
5. Help! Is there a photographer in the house?
All to often, church websites are filled with blurry, small, stretched or otherwise poor photos of church members, services, and other activities.
This usually is because there is nobody who is truly in charge of taking pictures at the church.
And when there is a need for pictures for the website, newsletter, or social media, the secretary, youth pastor, or worship pastor is asked to take pictures (in addition to their endless list of other tasks.)
The great thing about this problem is that there is typically a very simple and cost effective solution: Hire a teenager!
Most churches have a teenager who works for the school newspaper or has the hobby of photography. If so, they will have the camera needed to get good photos and will be able to provide this service at a reasonable rate.
3 Steps to get Great Pictures for Your Church Website:
1. Make an announcement.
At church or the next youth group meeting, announce that the church is looking for a teenager to take pictures for the church website. If you know of someone in particular that has this skill set, you can contact them directly and skip the announcement.
2. Meet with the person.
Review some of their work to make sure they take good photos and are a good fit for the role. Make the arrangement clear – is it a volunteer role or will there be
3. Ask them to take pictures one week.
They could do this at church services and other church events (youth group, etc), review/edit (if they know editing) the pictures taken, and share the pictures with you within a week.
Make sure they share the images via Dropbox or a thumb drive. Sometimes sharing images via text and email doesn’t work well because those methods compress the image files, which reduces their file size and resolution.
The idea is give them a short trial period without making a long term commitment. If they do a good job and it seems like a good fit for both of you, then you can agree to taking photos on a regular basis.
Don’t settle for bad pictures on your church website. Hire a teenager. -Mark Steinbrueck
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If your church doesn’t have a teenager, you may have a stay-at-home mom or dad who loves photography and can fill the role.
6. How to Edit Photos for Your Church Website: 7 Easy Fixes Anyone Can Make
Photos are one of the first things people notice when they visit your church website.
Great photos can help people get a feel for your church before they ever attend a service. They can show visitors what worship looks like, who attends your church, what happens in your children’s ministry, and what kind of community they can expect to find.
But even a good photo does not always look great straight out of the camera.
Maybe the picture is a little dark. Maybe there is too much empty space around the people. Maybe the camera was slightly crooked. Or perhaps someone left a trash can, microphone stand, or other distraction sitting in the background.
The good news is that you don’t need to be a professional photographer or know how to use Photoshop to fix many common photo problems.
Today’s photo editing tools make it surprisingly easy for church staff and volunteers to improve photos before adding them to a website.
Here are…
7 Easy Church Website Photo Fixes Anyone Can Make
1. Crop Out Distractions
One of the easiest ways to improve a photo is simply to crop it.
Look around the edges of the picture. Is there a lot of empty space? Half of another person? A doorway that adds nothing to the photo? Something distracting in the foreground?
Less is more.
Cropping allows you to remove unnecessary elements, which brings more attention to the most important elements of the picture.
For example, if you have a photo of three people talking after worship but they only occupy the center third of the image, cropping closer to them can make the picture feel much more personal and engaging.
Just be careful not to crop too tightly. Give people a little room around their heads and bodies, and avoid cutting people off awkwardly at joints like knees, elbows, or ankles.
Tip: Before cropping, ask yourself, “What do I want someone to notice first when they see this photo?” Then crop to emphasize that.
For the other 6 quick photo fixes you can make, click to How to Edit Photos for Your Church Website: 7 Easy Fixes Anyone Can Make
The goal of photo editing isn’t to make your church look different. It’s to help people see your church more clearly.
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7. An Easy SEO Trick for Photos
In this article I’m going to share an easy SEO trick for photos anyone can do. Not many web admins do this, so if you do, it will give your website an advantage in the search engines.
Google is very smart, but it doesn’t totally understand photos.
Search engines have gotten much better at identifying what objects are included in each photo, but they don’t understand the context of those photos.
For example, a search engine might be able to identify smiling children in a photo, but it’s not going to understand that it is kids in your children’s ministry worshiping God and getting to know Him in bible lessons.
Therefore, search engines rely on website developers and administrators to explain what’s in each photo using what is called the “ALT attribute.”
The ALT attribute provides alternate information about a photo in case a website visitor cannot view it (for example if they have a slow Internet connection, have images turned off, or are visually impaired and use a screen reader).
Let’s talk about…
3 Ways Website Admins Address Website Image ALT Attributes
Bad: Most website admins ignore the ALT attribute and leave it blank.
Better: Some admins put a few descriptive words in the ALT attribute.
Best: Smart website admins who want their website to rank better in search engines craft their ALT attributes to include words that describe the image and keywords they want to rank well for.
For more on ALT attributes and a real-world example, click to An Easy SEO Trick for Photos
On-page SEO is about helping search engines better understand what your website is about. -Paul Steinbrueck
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8. How to Optimize Photos for Faster Load Times, Better Search Rankings
Photos can make a church website feel warm, welcoming, and personal. They give potential visitors a glimpse of your worship, your people, your children’s ministry, and the community they may experience when they visit.
But photos can also create a problem.
The high-resolution images produced by today’s phones and cameras can be very large. Upload several of those images directly to a website and they can dramatically increase the amount of data visitors have to download.
That matters because people don’t like waiting for websites to load, and neither does Google.
Since 2018, Google has made page speed is a factor in its search ranking algorithm. They expanded this in 2021, making Core Web Vitals a factor in search rankings.
One of those measurements, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), measures how quickly the largest visible content element appears. On many church websites, that element is a large photo near the top of the page.
At OurChurch.com, we’ve designed, hosted, and optimized church websites since 1996. In our experience, unnecessarily large and poorly optimized images continue to be one of the most common contributors to slow-loading pages.
Fortunately, church website image optimization doesn’t mean you have to stop using great photography.
7 Ways to Optimize Church Website Photos for Faster Load Times
1. Don’t Upload Huge Camera Images Directly to Your Website
Modern smartphones and digital cameras produce images that are thousands of pixels wide.
That’s great if you’re creating a large print, but your church website doesn’t need images that large.
If an image is going to display at a fraction of its original size, uploading the full-size original wastes disk space, bandwidth and visitors’ time waiting for it to load.
Before uploading a photo to your website, create a copy on your computer and resize that copy to 1920 pixels wide.
For 6 more ways to optimize church website photos, click to read How to Optimize Photos for Faster Load Times, Better Search Rankings
And remember…
We’re obsessed with speed. -Google
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9. Do Google Business Profile Photos Improve Local Search Rankings?
Photos are one of the most noticeable parts of a Google Business Profile. They can show potential visitors what an organization looks like, what happens there, and what they can expect when they arrive.
But can adding more photos to your Google Business Profile also improve where your organization ranks in local Google search results?
Earlier research found a strong connection between the number of photos on a profile and the amount of activity the profile received. More recent testing, however, suggests that uploading additional photos does not directly cause a profile to rank higher.
So, what does the research actually tell us, and how should churches, ministries, schools, and local businesses use Google Business Profile photos?
What Earlier Research Found About Google Business Profile Photos
In 2019, BrightLocal published a study examining 45,000 Google My Business listings across 36 industries. (Note: Google My Business has since been renamed Google Business Profile.)
The study found that organizations with more photos tended to receive more:
- Views on Google Search and Maps
- Website visits
- Phone calls
- Requests for driving directions
Businesses with more than 100 photos received considerably more activity than the average business in the study. BrightLocal also found that the median business had only 11 photos on its listing.
At first glance, these findings appear to suggest that uploading more photos will improve the performance of a Google Business Profile.
However, the study found a correlation, not necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship.
An organization may have more photos because it is already popular, receives more visitors, has operated longer, or belongs to an industry in which customers commonly take and upload pictures. Hotels and restaurants, for example, are likely to receive far more customer photos than accounting offices or other professional service businesses.
Organizations that actively manage their photos may also be more likely to keep the rest of their profile accurate and invest in other forms of marketing.
Therefore, we cannot assume that the photos alone caused those organizations to receive more views, calls, or clicks.
To see what the latest Google Business Profile photo research shows and why GBP photos are important, click to read Do Google Business Profile Photos Improve Local Search Rankings?
10. A Guide to Church Photo Release Forms
Your church hosts a worship service, Vacation Bible School, picnic, Christmas program, community outreach event, or youth activity.
Someone takes some great photos.
Now you’d like to post them on the church website or social media.
Do you need everyone’s permission first?
The answer isn’t a simple yes or no.
Whether your church should obtain a photo release can depend on who is pictured, whether the person is identifiable, whether they’re an adult or child, the circumstances in which the photo was taken, and how the church plans to use the image.
There is also an important distinction between permission to take a photograph and permission to use someone’s likeness in church communications or promotional materials.
This article provides practical guidelines for churches in the United States, along with a sample church photo release form and examples of real church photography policies.
In This Church Photo Release Guide
- What Is a Church Photo Release Form?
- Do Churches Need Photo Releases for Adults?
- What About Public Events and Photography Notices?
- What About Children and Teenagers?
- When Should a Church Get an Individual Photo Release?
- Should Your Church Have a Photography Policy?
- Sample Church Photo Release Form
- Other Important Photo Issues Churches Should Consider
- Practical Church Photography Principles
Click any of the links to the specific sub-topic you’d like to start with!
Church Website Photos – Tips from the Pros
We close the Ultimate Guide to Church Website Photos with some advice from some local SEO and church communications experts.
Every church website needs “paparazzi previews” of what to expect at church. SHOW, don’t tell what the literal experience of being in your church looks/feels like. -Kenny Jahng, KennyJahng.com
Place yourself in the shoes of a visitor. Choose photos that give them a warm, welcoming sense of your mission, while also introducing them to your physical campus. -Kaitlin Rawley, Flocknote.com
On all of your event or class registrations, include a quick line of text confirming their consent for marketing photography… Cover your back now so you have your documentation, and the folks in your church have an accurate understanding of how their photos may be used. -Matt Ehresman, CourageousStorytellers.com
People visiting your church want to… get a glimpse of what your church body looks like. It will help them make the decision: do I visit this church Sunday, or go down the street to a different church? -Lauren Hunter, ChurchTechToday.com
The Ultimate Guide to Church Website Photos was written by the OurChurch.Com team which has been helping churches, schools, nonprofits and businesses live out their mission online with web design, web hosting, and SEO since 1997.
