Church + House of Worship, Compare BoxCast, Church Website Design, Custom Website Builder
Creating and managing a website for your church can be a daunting task — especially if you're not super-tech savvy. There are so many website builders available … Which one should you choose, and why?
In this series, we dive into popular website builders to see how they stack up against BoxCast’s website builder, Sites. Read our post on WordPress vs. Sites.
To learn how to create and maintain a great church website using Sites, schedule a meeting with our friendly experts.
Creating a website for your church can be overwhelming, but don't worry — we're here to help! The first important step is to choose a website builder that suits your needs. There are several factors beyond cost to consider to ensure your website serves your ministry, members, and visitors.
In this post, we compare BoxCast Sites with Squarespace to help you determine which is the better choice for your church. Let's dive in!
Squarespace positions itself as “designed to sell,” and has done a tremendous job of crafting custom website templates for creatives. It’s no secret that Squarespace is often one of the top website platform recommendations from web designers and developers. Here’s why:
What if you’re not looking for a website that’s optimized for showcasing or selling a product, service, or brand? It can be challenging to customize a Squarespace template for community outreach and engagement since that was never its intended use. Squarespace templates can be hard to modify for your audience if you're not familiar with how to build a website.
Sites’s church website templates are designed, built, and optimized for houses of worship. They feature premade pages, layouts, and widgets with content-rich features for engaging today’s digitally savvy community.
If you’ve done any research into what’s important for websites, you’ve run across the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is a fancy way of saying you need to make sure big search engines (like Google) can find your site and recommend it to people browsing. So when they type in something like “churches near me,” it’ll suggest your website!
A lot goes into creating high-performing SEO pages and content. We dig further into this topic and outline best practices in another blog post, which you can read here.
When you’re choosing a website builder, it’s essential to make sure you have access to edit, customize, and implement as many SEO best practices as possible.
Squarespace has a simple SEO-friendly structure, but once you dig deeper, it’s lacking in a few ways. While it’s made great strides in the last few years, adding things like alt text to photos and making it easier to add meta titles and descriptions, its Developer Platform is very limited and doesn’t allow you to make many changes.
With Sites, you can ask BoxCast’s Support team to turn on Developer Mode, so you can edit any website element’s HTML or CSS. This can help you reduce load times, increase accessibility, and make all kinds of fine-tuned adjustments.
Also, where Squarespace does offer basic on-site SEO options, Sites is designed and built to align with Google’s recommended practices for speed, security, accessibility, and SEO.
Sometimes, you may work on your website and get stuck. You might not know how to add a widget, customize a block, or set up a 301 redirect. If this happens, you’ll likely need help from an expert — someone who’s familiar with how your website is set up.
Squarespace offers:
Sites offers:
You don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time you add something new to your site. The more things that update automatically, the better.
Both builders offer drag-and-drop widgets that can populate information and styles onto your website. Squarespace’s widgets tend to be fairly basic and not very customizable. Sites offers more customization, as well as connected data, which allows you to connect to internal or external databases and populate website elements. This means if you update something in the connected database, it’ll update everywhere.
Another great benefit only Sites offers is integration with BoxCast’s live streaming service. If you’re already streaming with BoxCast, you can add things like a special player that automatically updates with your latest broadcast and a countdown timer that pulls data from the Streaming Dashboard and alerts viewers to when your next broadcast will air.
As of the time of this writing, Squarespace offers plans that range in price from $23–65 per month. Sites has one plan that costs $49 per month and will migrate your content from another website for an additional fee.
No, Squarespace won’t import your current website content to their platform. Sites will migrate existing content on your current website and import it to your new website.This feature is included in their setup fee.
Squarespace, while great for retailers and creative professionals, may be challenging to customize for community outreach.
BoxCast's Sites is specifically designed for houses of worship, offering templates, layouts, and widgets tailored to your ministry's needs. Sites also excels in SEO, flexibility to fine-tune website elements, and alignment with Google's recommended practices.
Sites offers robust support, with a comprehensive Support Center, real-person chat, and seven-day phone support. It's a user-friendly and church-specific solution to enhance your online ministry experience.
Absolutely! With Sites, you can ask BoxCast’s Support team to turn on Developer Mode, so you can edit any website element’s HTML or CSS. This empowers you to enhance speed, accessibility, and overall SEO alignment according to Google’s recommendations.
Choosing a church website builder can be tricky, but after our showdown between Squarespace and BoxCast's Sites, it's clear that Sites is the tailored hero your ministry needs. Unlike Squarespace, Sites is designed for churches, with easy customization, top-notch SEO alignment, and reliable support when and how you need it. Sites simplifies your workflow with customizable widgets and seamless live streaming integration with the BoxCast Platform.
Ready to elevate your online ministry? Schedule a demo with our friendly experts and let Sites be your trusty sidekick!
Want to learn more? Give these a read:
© 2024 BoxCast. All Rights Reserved. | +1-888-392-2278