Should your church and school have separate websites?

Let’s dig into the pros and cons of breaking apart your two sites.

PROS

• ⭐ Kill it at the SEO game!
  • Each site can get its own set of focused keywords. Every page on your church site can be focused on church-related keywords: church near me, church in x city, lutheran church, family friendly church, christian church, etc. Likewise, every page on your school site can be focused on school-related keywords: private school near me, christian school near me, all-day preschool near me, small private school near me, etc. Google is smart and stupid all at once. The more dialed-in your site can be, the easier it is for Google to understand and then to show to the right curious onlookers.
  • Another note on SEO (trying not to get too nerdy 🤓): You can backlink between your two sites. Ex: On your school staff page, you include a bio for Pastor Smith. In his bio, you include a link over to the church website. Backlinking like this is SEO gold! (click to learn more about backlinking)
• Your church and school inherently have different calls-to-action (CTA), or primary “asks” of their audience. Likely, your church’s CTA is to visit for worship or inquire about a Bible information class. Likely, your school’s CTA is to book a tour. When your sites are combined, neither CTA gets the real estate it deserves on your website. More specifically, I often see the school get the short end of the stick: the “Book a Tour” button is hidden on a singular page of the church’s site. Splitting the sites means that a visitor can’t possibly miss the “ask.”

CONS

• 💰 Double the domain and hosting fees.
  • Exception: You can get around this by creating a subdomain, which usually comes free with your domain host. Ex: Instead of paying for both stjohns.com and stjohnsschool.com, you can create the subdomain school.stjohns.com for (most likely) free. Google still counts these as separate sites for SEO purposes, so the PROS list still applies.
• Increased administrative overhead. 😅 You now have two sites to update instead of one. Make sure you have plenty of time (or staff with time) for updates so you can actually reap the benefits of making this change.

I made this change for a church/school a while back. Since then, they’ve shared with me that they’ve seen far more school tour requests come through than they had in the past. Of course, this could be due to more factors than the split, but it certainly didn’t hurt! At the end of the day, the goal is to be able to connect (ideally in-person) with more souls in your community.

Thoughts? Is this something your church/school might consider?