WordPress Church Website: Things to Think About

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I built a new Wordpress church website lately, for the church I attend. Here are some things I ran across in the process.


December 26, 2019

The Initial WordPress Church Website Vision

Once a WordPress church website is set up, it’s very easy to maintain. You get (or build) a template, add any plugins you think you’ll need, and you’re pretty much done except for adding content and running occasional updates.

My own church’s site is currently running on WordPress. When I built it, I pictured a few pages (About, Contact, etc.) and then a blog section where we’d put all of the sermons and notes. We’ve already got a place that hosts our sermons though, and folks want to keep using that service.

sermon.net

This is a place where churches can store recordings of their services. It’s got a couple of tiers. We’re using it for free, so at some point when we hit our storage limit, older sermons will get deleted as newer ones get added. Or maybe we’ll start paying and get on the other tier. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, but for now the audio is up there and we’ve finagled showing it on our WordPress church site.

Marrying the Two

Once you’ve got your sermon all uploaded, sermon.net renames the mp3 file, and you can call that with an audio tag on your own site. Use something like this:

 
<audio controls="controls">
  <source src="https://LFBC.sermon.net/da/21234905.mp3" type="audio/mp3" />
</audio>

That will create a little audio player on your site, and suck in the mp3 that’s over on the sermon.net site. I just copy and paste that into every new post, then change the number. In this case, it’s 21234095 That’s the same number you’ll see at the end of the regular link that someone would follow to listen on sermon.net. For the church I go to, and this sermon, that would be https://lfbc.sermon.net/main/main/21234905.

That number is in your archive too:
sermon.net number used for displaying content on a wordpress church site

It’s the Episode ID you can see in there.

Build Your Own WordPress Church Website

Like I said, once the site is built, it’s real easy to maintain. If you need a hand, holler my way and I’ll see if I can help out.

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