Most of the time when I talk to people about church SEO (search engine optimization), they immediately start asking about which keywords to target and where to put them on their pages.
While these aspects of church SEO are important, before addressing them, it’s important to make sure you don’t overlook some other things that could absolutely tank your search rankings.
What are these things?
6 Technical SEO Issues to Avoid
Technical SEO issues are things related to church website design, that could cause search engines to penalize your website or not be able to read it at all. To use an analogy…
Failing to address technical SEO issues is like starting your SEO journey with the parking brake left on.
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The good thing is, Google wants to be able to crawl, index, and accurately rank your website. This is why they created Google Search Console (GSC) which has the tools we need to check all 6 of the potential problems we’re going to look at in this article.
Connect Your Website with Google Search Console
If you haven’t yet connected your church website with Google Search Console, go there and click “Start Now.” Then login to your Google account (or create a Google account if you don’t have one).
Next you will need to verify you have ownership of the website. Google Search Console provides two options “Domain” or “URL prefix.”
The “Domain” option is the better option because it will provide data for all sub-domains and protocols. The “Domain” option requires DNS verification, which means you will have to edit your DNS zone and add some text to it. If you don’t know how to do this, your web hosting company should help you with this.
Once you’ve verified your website with GSC, you’re ready to do your first technical SEO check.
1) XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, posts, and other files on the website in a format (XML) specifically designed for search engines to read. (Note this is different than a sitemap created for human visitors to use as a guide to your website).
If your website does not have a working sitemap, Google and other search engines may not be able to find all of the pages, posts, videos and other content on your website.
If your website was built using WordPress, you can use a plugin like SEO Yoast to generate an XML sitemap for you. If you use OurChurch.Com’s WP-EZ Church Website Builder, it has SEO Yoast built in, and automatically creates a sitemap for you.
Submit your sitemap to GSC:
- Click the “Sitemaps” option in the left menu
- Under the “Add a new sitemap” heading enter “sitemap_index.xml” (without quotes).
- Click the “Submit” button.
On the GSC Sitemaps page, you should see the /sitemap_index.xml listed. If it’s working, the status will be “Success.” If the status is “Pending,” you may need to check back in a few hours.
If the status is “couldn’t fetch,” you’ll need to check to see if there is a problem with your website’s sitemap or if perhaps it has a different filename. Work with your website developer or web hosting company to get to the bottom of the issue, then resubmit your sitemap or submit the correct filename.
Resume Checks in 24 Hours
If you just submitted your sitemap to GSC for the first time, it may take up to 24 hours for Google to process your sitemap. Look on the Sitemaps page under “Discovered Pages.” If the number of discovered URLs in your sitemap is 0, that means your sitemap has NOT been processed. Check again a day later.
If/when the Discovered Pages > 0, continue with the rest of the checks.
2) Page Indexing
Once Google is aware of the web pages in your website, it has to “crawl” or read your pages.
Then it must “index” the pages. Indexing is the process of storing and organizing pages in its database.
If a web page is not indexed, it is not in Google’s database and will not appear in the Google search results. Therefore, it’s really important to know which if any of the pages of your website have not been indexed, and try to get Google to index them.
Fortunately, in Google Search Console, if you click the “Pages” option in the left menu, you will see a report that shows the reasons why Google has not indexed pages and how many pages. Here’s an example:
Let’s take a look at each of these reasons why Google doesn’t index pages and discuss what to do about each:
Blocked by robots.txt
The robots.txt file is a file in your website that tells search engines about pages you don’t want them to index (e.g. a private page, the admin part of your site). Sometimes people or website plugins accidentally add things to the robots.txt file which blocks search engines from indexing important pages or even the entire site.
Review the pages blocked by robots.txt and if there are any listed there that shouldn’t be, edit the robots.txt file.
Not found (404)
Sometimes Google tries to crawl a page that doesn’t exist.
- Perhaps a page was accidentally unpublished or deleted and needs to be restored.
- Perhaps there’s a link on a web page that was set up incorrectly with a URL that doesn’t exist, and that broken link needs to be fixed.
- Perhaps the site admin intentionally unpublished a page that is no longer helpful or relevant.
Page with redirect
It’s not uncommon for an old URL to be redirected to a new URL In this case, Google will no longer index the old URL. It’s good to review these and make sure there are no unexpected redirects.
Discovered – Currently not indexed
Google is aware of the pages in this list, but it hasn’t yet crawled (read) them yet. This happens when a page is relatively new (published in the last week). If a page has been published longer than that, it may mean Google doesn’t think it’s important enough to read.
Crawled – currently not indexed
Google has read the pages on this list, but it doesn’t think they are important or helpful enough to include them in its search results. Unfortunately, as the amount of content published online grows exponentially (thanks in part to AI), we are seeing more and more pages fall into this category.
To try to get Google to index these pages, improve the quality of the content of the page and improve the number and prominence of the links to the pages. We’ll go into more detail on this in a future article.
Note: Don’t panic if Search Console shows some pages as “Not indexed.” Many exclusions are completely normal (especially “category” and “tag” pages, and URLs within a calendar, which could have thousands of pages for every day, week, and month.) The goal is to identify important pages that should be indexed but aren’t.
3) Manual Actions (Penalties)
On very rare occasions, Google will penalize a website for breaking its rules. Penalties can be as severe as complete removal from Google. In that case, no amount of SEO will get a website to appear in the search results until the manual action has been addressed.
Click the “Manual Actions” menu option on the left side of GSC to see if your website has been assessed any penalties.
For more info, see Google’s list of manual actions and how to recover from them.
4) Security Issues
Security issues include things like malware. If Google detects a web page has a security issue and could be dangerous to visitors, when people using the Google Chrome web browser try to access that page, they will be shown a warning page instead.
Click the “Security Actions” menu option to see if your website has any security issues.
5) HTTPS
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, and it’s a more secure version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTPS encrypts data sent between a web browser and a web server to protect it from unauthorized access or tampering.
Google recommends all websites use HTTPS by having an SSL security certificate installed. It sees HTTPS as a sign of trust and gives websites using HTTPS a small boost in search results over those using HTTP.
In Google Search Console, open the HTTPS report and check whether Google has detected any HTTP pages or problems with the HTTPS versions of your pages.
OurChurch.com sets up an SSL certificate for all custom designed sites we host as well as those created with our WP-EZ Website Builder. This is included at no extra charge.
6) Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of metrics introduced by Google in 2021 which are intended to evaluate a website visitor’s experience. Previously Google had Page Speed as a search ranking factor. CWV expands on this.
Google doesn’t want to “recommend” web pages in its search results that are slow to load or give visitors a poor experience, so poor CWV scores can negatively impact your website’s search rankings.
As of 2026, Google’s three Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measure loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.
To check to see how your website’s LCP, INP and CLS, use Google PageSpeed Insights.
Whew! Long post, I know, but I hope you found it worthwhile.
Any one of these 6 problems could totally kill your church’s search rankings and hinder the effectiveness of any church SEO you do.
Do the checks. Fix any problems you discover. Then your website will be primed to win the SEO race!
OurChurch.com Prioritizes Technical SEO
At OurChurch.Com, we have worked with thousands of churches and Christian organizations over the years, and we routinely encounter technical SEO problems that prevent otherwise good websites from performing as well as they should in Google.
We check all of these aspects of technical SEO when we do an SEO Audit, which can be ordered as a stand-alone service.
Additionally, we include an SEO Audit as the first step of our church SEO service and Christian SEO services.
If you’d like to make sure these technical SEO issues are tested and addressed correctly, consider working with our team.
Complete the consultation request form below (mobile) or to the right (desktop), to schedule a call to discuss web design or SEO.
Comment and Discuss
- What comments and questions do you have about technical SEO?
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Co-founder & CEO, OurChurch.Com
Paul has been the CEO of OurChurch.Com since its founding in 1996, combining his passion for faith and technology to lead the organization.
An accomplished writer, Paul has authored over 2,000 articles on faith and technology, featured on platforms like ChurchLeaders.com, The JoyFM, and his personal blog, LiveIntentionally.org.
Beyond his professional achievements, Paul serves as an elder at Journey Community Church and is deeply engaged in his community through his involvement with the Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranch and the Safety Harbor Chamber of Commerce. He is a contributing author of the book Outspoken! Conversations on Church Communication.
