# Church website checklist, ordered by what is actually missing Church: ______________________________ Checked by: ______________________________ Date: ____________ Site URL: ______________________________ Every item below is ordered by how many of 203 church websites were missing it when they were crawled on 30 July 2026 UTC. Fix them in this order. The bottom four are the ones every other church website article opens with, and they are already done on almost every site in the sample. The 203 sites are every church in the Church Posting register that carries a website URL. The register was assembled and verified by editors on 28 July 2026, not drawn at random from US congregations, and it skews confessional and Reformed. Cite it as "203 church websites from the Church Posting register, checked on 30 July 2026", never as "US church websites". The register is at https://churchposting.com/churches/ and the aggregate table is at https://churchposting.com/downloads/website-checklist-209-aggregate.csv Six further sites were attempted and not analyzed: three returned HTTP 403, two disallowed this crawler in robots.txt, and one served a certificate chain that does not verify on a clean client. None of the six is folded into a denominator anywhere. --- ## How to work through this Open the church homepage in a desktop browser. Press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) to see the HTML the way a crawler sees it, and Ctrl+F inside that view to search it. Everything below can be checked from that one view plus a phone. Budget ninety minutes for the whole list and about four hours for the fixes if the site is on WordPress, Squarespace or Wix. Do not start at the top of the list if the site is missing something at the bottom. A site with no service time on the homepage fixes that first, then comes back up here. --- ## 1. A Church, ReligiousOrganization or Place type in the JSON-LD Missing on 187 of 203. Church appeared 5 times. ReligiousOrganization appeared zero times. 53 sites type themselves LocalBusiness and 45 emit Organization and nothing more specific. [ ] Ctrl+F the source for `application/ld+json`. If nothing comes back, the site publishes no structured data at all, which is where 86 of the 203 sit. [ ] If a block exists, Ctrl+F it for `"@type"`. Write down every type you find. [ ] Add a block naming the congregation, its postal address, its telephone and its service hours. Put it on the homepage. The block to paste is at the bottom of this file. [ ] Check the block parses. Paste it into Google's Rich Results Test before you publish. Not one of the 117 blocks in the sample failed to parse, so a parse error would put a church below every peer in the sample. Platform note, from the same crawl. All 47 Squarespace sites in the sample emit JSON-LD and none of the 47 is typed as a church, a religious organization or a place. Wix: 15 of 17 emit JSON-LD and none of the 17 is typed that way. WordPress is the only platform in the sample where churches get this right, on 12 of 69 sites. If the site is on Squarespace or Wix, no setting does this. Paste the block into the custom code field. What this does not do: it does not make the church rank. It makes the facts machine readable so a tool reading the site does not have to guess them out of prose. ## 2. Service hours in the JSON-LD Missing on 173 of 203. Only 30 publish hours a machine can read, and only one of those uses the OpeningHoursSpecification object rather than the plain openingHours string. [ ] 168 sites in the sample print a service time for a person and publish nothing for a machine. Check whether this is one of them: the time is in the page text and there is no `openingHours` anywhere in the source. [ ] Add `openingHoursSpecification` with `dayOfWeek`, `opens` and `closes` in hh:mm:ss or hh:mm form, one entry per service. [ ] Make the hours match the text on the page. Structured data that describes something not visible on the page is against Google's own guidelines. [ ] Set the hours again on the Google Business Profile, which is a separate system and does not read the website. ## 3. A phone number that can be tapped to dial Missing on 156 of 203. 144 sites show a number somewhere in the text, so 97 of the 144 make a phone user retype it. That is 144 minus 47. [ ] Ctrl+F the source for `tel:`. If it is absent, this item fails. [ ] Wrap every visible phone number in ``. Keep the visible digits formatted the way a human reads them. [ ] Open the homepage on an actual phone and tap the number. [ ] Put the number in the header or the footer, not only on a contact page. ## 4. Exactly one h1 element Missing on 127 of 203. 60 sites carry no h1 at all, 67 carry more than one, and one site emits eighteen. [ ] Ctrl+F the source for ``. [ ] Two sites in the sample carry no viewport tag at all. Add one if this is one of them. [ ] This is the only accessibility item in this list. It is not an accessibility audit. ## 11. Over 1,000 characters of text in the HTML Fails on 21 of 203. Four sites ship under 500 characters and the lowest is 98. [ ] Ctrl+U and read what is there. If the page is close to empty, the content arrives by JavaScript. [ ] Google renders JavaScript and says pages queue for rendering, which "may stay on this queue for a few seconds, but it can take longer than that". Nothing here says the page will not be indexed. It says the service time and the address are not in the first thing anybody reads. [ ] Get the service time, the address and the phone number into the served HTML, even if the rest of the page stays as it is. ## 12. An address in the homepage text Missing on 12 of 203. An address that exists only inside a map embed or an image counts as missing here, because it is missing from the text. [ ] Ctrl+F the page text for the street name. [ ] Write the full street address, city, state and ZIP as text near the service times. Keep the map as well. ## 13. A service time on the homepage Missing on 8 of 203. Within one click, missing on exactly one site in the sample. [ ] Read the homepage without scrolling. If the time is not there, put it there. [ ] Name the day and the time together. The measure used here looks for a clock time within 80 characters of a weekday name or a service word, which is what a stranger scans for too. [ ] If there are several services, list all of them. If one is seasonal, say the dates. ## 14. Served over HTTPS Fails on 4 of 203. 110 sites send an HSTS header. [ ] Type the http:// address and see whether it redirects to https://. [ ] Every current host issues a free certificate. If the site is on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Subsplash or Weebly, this is a setting and not a project. [ ] 21 sites in the sample redirect to a different host than the one requested. That is usually fine. Check that the address on the printed bulletin is the one that answers. --- ## What this checklist does not cover, and was not tested Nothing below was measured, so nothing below carries a number. - **Page speed as a real user experiences it.** The crawl measured time to last byte of the HTML document on one connection from one machine. Median 160 ms, and exactly one site of 203 took over three seconds. That is not LCP, not INP, not CLS, and not a Lighthouse score. Speed is not a finding in this sample and no church should be told to fix it on this evidence. - **Accessibility beyond the zoom tag.** Contrast, keyboard focus order, alt text coverage, form labels and screen reader behavior were not tested on any site. - **Whether any giving link works.** No link was followed and no payment was attempted. - **Whether any stated service time is accurate.** The crawl found the pattern. It did not attend a service. - **Whether Google honors Church over LocalBusiness for a congregation.** Google's local business structured data documentation asks for the most specific LocalBusiness subtype and does not name Church or ReligiousOrganization. No site in the sample was submitted to a testing tool and no ranking effect was measured. - **Design, photography, copy quality and whether anybody stayed.** None of it is in this file. --- ## The block to paste, for item 1 and item 2 Replace every value between the angle brackets and delete the brackets. Put it in the `` of the homepage, or in whatever field the platform calls custom header code. One `openingHoursSpecification` entry per service. Times are 24 hour. Delete the `geo` block rather than guessing coordinates. Every property here is one schema.org Church inherits from Place or CivicStructure. Google's local business documentation asks for the most specific LocalBusiness subtype and does not name Church or ReligiousOrganization, so if the goal is specifically Google's local business features rather than an accurate description of the congregation, `"@type": ["Church", "LocalBusiness"]` is the version to test. Which typing Google honors for a congregation was not tested for this file. Before publishing, paste the block on its own into Google's Rich Results Test and confirm it parses. Then confirm every fact in it also appears in words on the homepage, because Google's structured data guidelines say plainly: "Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page." --- Church Posting. https://churchposting.com/resources/growth/church-website-checklist/ Crawl date 30 July 2026 UTC. Register verified 28 July 2026.