Whether you’re maintaining your church’s website or providing content for someone does, here are some best practices to follow.
Never use flyers created for bulletins, bulletin boards or slides
Why this is important: Probably half the visitors to your website are using mobile phones to look at it. By the time a slide or flyer is reduced to size for mobile display, the text is impossible to read. So you’re not communicating at that point; you’re only frustrating people who are interested in what’s going on in your church. You’re also racking up penalties from search engines, which notice when a “mobile-friendly” website includes content that is not mobile-friendly. It’s also true that search engines cannot read text embedded in images, so there’s no chance that the message in your flyer will be read and shared by a search engine.
What to do instead: If the image in your flyer is appropriate, and if you have a license to publish it on your website, use that along with a title/headline and descriptive text.
For more info, enter “using images with text on websites” in your favorite search engine.
In choosing images, be very, very, very careful
Why this is important: If you pick up an image from Google or from any other source, chances are it’s copyrighted. If you don’t purchase a license to use that image, your church may get a demand for payment for use of the image, and the compensation demanded won’t be small. So you not only need to pay for images you use, but you need to be able to prove you’ve paid.
Two cases with which I’m unfortunately familiar:
- An image used at the size of a postage stamp on a church’s home page resulted in a request for $1,000 in compensation from the copyright holder. I had purchased the right to use the image, so the church didn’t have to pay.
- An image used in 2019 to illustrate an announcement about a candlelight service was cited in a recent (2026) letter demanding proof of purchase. The demand included a link to a web page — clearly a page from that church’s website — where the image appeared. That page was published in 2019 and later removed from the website. We didn’t put that image on the website — a volunteer did — and it’s no longer in the website’s image bank, so the church has no information about whether the use of the image was legal or not. That matter is now in the hands of the church’s lawyer.
There is at least one company actively pursuing churches for unauthorized use of images, and professional photographers can use Google’s image search and other methods to find their photos on websites all over the world. So be conscientious when you choose images for your website.
These photos are okay to use:
- photos taken by you or people in your church (who permit you to use their photographs);
- images from free online photo sites;
- images from Canva, if you have a Canva account;
- and images you purchase from online sites such as Adobe Stock, Dreamstime and Shutterstock.
Free photos are available from several websites, including Pexels and Unsplash.
Tip: To make it easy to trace the source of an image, keep its filename.
For more info, enter “image copyright issues and websites” in your preferred search engine.
Don’t publish email addresses on your website
Why this is important: You may ask people in your congregation to sign up for classes by emailing teachers of those classes, or you may want to make your church’s email address or the minister’s email address easy to find. The problem: Publishing email addresses on websites opens those addresses to massive amounts of spam, phishing attacks, and malicious, automated data harvesting.
What to do instead: Invite contact through an online form (such as the one found on most pages titled Contact Us). Whenever someone uses the form, the form sends an email to one or more addresses you choose, but it doesn’t expose those email addresses to the world.
You also can create custom signup forms for classes and other events (if we host your website, or if your web host offers a custom form builder).
For more info, enter “publishing email addresses on websites in your preferred search engine.
Don’t publish Zoom links on your website
Why this is important: We understand why you want to publish links to your Zoom sessions, especially if you use Zoom for Sunday services. You want to make it easy for people to join you. However, Zoom recommends that you just don’t do it. Even if you’ve had no trouble so far, you invite trouble when you put your link out there for everyone to use. Google identifies several kinds of trouble, including “Zoom bombing,” which is disrupting meetings just for fun.
What to do instead: Provide a simple form so that people who want to join your service, class or discussion can submit their email address, and then include those folks in an email you send with the Zoom link.
Use your favorite search engine to find more info about Zoom security.
