Christmas Eve Starts on Your Website: A Check-Up for the Week Visitors Show Up
For a lot of churches, Christmas Eve is the night the most new people walk through the door all year. Most of them meet your church before they arrive, on your website, on a phone, a few days ahead.
They are not browsing. They have one or two questions, and they will give your site about as long as it takes to answer them. If the answer is easy to find, they come. If it is buried, out of date, or missing, some of them pick a different church, and you never hear about it.
None of what follows needs a redesign. It is an afternoon of checking, and the middle of November is the right time to do it, before the calendar fills up and the person who edits the website is also running the Christmas production.
What a Christmas visitor is actually looking for
Almost always, in this order:
- What time are the services? Every service, with the date, not just "Christmas Eve."
- Where is it? The address, where to park, and which door to use if that is not obvious.
- What about my kids? Is there childcare, is it a family service, do I need to sign them up?
- What is it like? How long it runs, what people wear, whether there is anything to know before showing up.
- Can I watch instead? If the weather turns or someone is sick, where is the livestream and when does it start?
Everything else on your site is fine to leave alone for December. These five are the ones worth getting right.
The check-up
1. The service times are on the home page, on a phone, without scrolling
Open your website on your phone. Not the admin view, not a laptop: your phone, the way a visitor would. Can you see the Christmas service times without scrolling or tapping into a menu?
If the answer is no, that is the single highest-value fix on this list. A banner, a card at the top, or a line under the main heading is enough. It does not need to be pretty. It needs to be first.
2. Last year's times are gone, everywhere
This is the one that catches churches every year. The times were updated on the Christmas page, but last year's banner is still in the footer, or an old event is still on the calendar, or a blog post from last December still ranks in search.
Search your own site for "Christmas" and read every result. Then look beyond the website:
- Your Google listing. For many visitors, the search result is the first thing they see, before your site. Google Business Profile lets you add special hours for holidays and post an event. Make sure it does not still say what it said last year.
- Social profiles. Pinned posts and "about" sections linger for a long time.
- Anything printed. If an invite card carries a web address, make sure that address still goes somewhere useful.
3. One page that answers everything
Give Christmas a single page with a short, sayable address, like yourchurch.org/christmas, and put everything from the list above on it. Then use that one address on the invite cards, the slides, the social posts, and the email.
The point is not the page. The point is that every invitation points to one place, so there is only one place to keep right.
4. Sign-ups match reality
If anything needs a sign-up — childcare, a children's program, volunteer slots, a ticketed concert — check that the website and the registration agree. A sign-up that closed or filled up should say so on the page. "Register now" on a full event is a small disappointment for the visitor and a large one for the person who has to send the "sorry, we're full" email.
5. The livestream link works, and goes to the right place
Click it. Does it go to this year's stream, or the channel's home page, or last Easter's video? Does the page say what time the stream starts, and in which time zone if you have viewers further away?
Then plan to click it again the morning of December 24. Streaming links change more often than anything else on a church website, and a live event is the worst time to find a dead one.
6. The phone test, on cell data
Turn off wifi and load your site on cell service. Note how long it takes before you can read the service times. Then look for anything sitting on top of them: a cookie banner, a newsletter pop-up, a chat bubble, a "download our app" prompt. Any one of those can cover the only thing a visitor came for.
If something covers the times on a small screen, turn it off for December. It will still be there in January.
7. Plan for December 26
The day after Christmas, every service time on your site is wrong. Put a reminder on someone's calendar to take the Christmas banner down and replace it with what comes next: your January series, a newcomers' lunch, a group starting up.
Visitors who liked Christmas Eve often come back to the website that week to see what else is going on. Give them something to find.
Who should do this, and when
One person, twice.
The first pass, before December 1, catches the structural problems: missing times, the old banner, the broken link. The second pass, the week before Christmas, catches whatever changed in the meantime, because something always does.
The best person for it is someone who does not update the website. Staff navigate from memory and see what they expect to see. Someone fresh finds what a visitor finds. A volunteer with a phone and twenty minutes is perfect.
If your events already live in Planning Center
Many churches set up their Christmas services, sign-ups and childcare in Planning Center first, and then someone types the same details into the website. That second step is where last year's times and closed sign-ups come from.
wtxLabs Sync puts your Planning Center calendar and registrations on your website and keeps them current on its own. When a time changes or a sign-up fills in Planning Center, the website shows it shortly after, with nobody retyping anything. If you are also checking Giving before year end, this earlier post covers that side.
The bottom line
Pick up your phone, go to your website like a stranger would, and try to answer five questions: when, where, what about the kids, what is it like, and can I watch from home. Whatever was hard to find, fix first.
It is the cheapest outreach you will do all season, and it is easier now than in the week before Christmas.
Want a second pair of eyes on your site before December? Get in touch and we will walk it the way a first-time visitor would.