How to Optimize Your Catholic Parish Website for Lent and Easter

The Most Eventful Time of the Year

The Catholic Superbowl is upon us. Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection are the crowned jewels of our liturgical year. It is a powerful time of year for Catholics. It’s the reason our faith exists!

During Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, Catholics across the world engage in various traditions only celebrated and observed during this time of the year, including fish fries, Stations of the Cross, the Holy Triduum, and more. All of them are making plans around when, where, and how they want to engage in them. Common questions they have include: Where are mom and dad going for Holy Thursday? Does the fish fry offer kid’s meals? When does the Stations of the Cross start? When is the parish Confession night?

Many search Google and browse parish websites looking for this information. It’s important to have your parish website ready so regular members and non-members visiting from out of town can easily find the information they’re looking for. 

Unfortunately, I’ve seen parish websites that make this information difficult to find or unclear, which results in missed opportunities and an unenjoyable user experience. 

Here are some tips on how to optimize your website during the seasons of Lent and Easter.

Hello User Persona!

One of the most important assets you can invest in for your website and marketing is a few good user personas. These are fictional people you make up to humanize your audience. You give them a name, choose a photo of them, fill out basic demographic information, and write down information relevant to your business/parish. This information could be:

• Name

• Location

• Occupation

• Marital status

• Faith status

• Number of children

• Pain points (relevant to your business/parish)

• Life goals

• Ideal Mass Time

• Mobility limitations

• Ministries

• What would help them take the next step in their faith

• Relationship to Technology

• And more

While it’s good to understand general information about your audience, it’s easier and more fun to empathize with a name and a face than with numbers and analytics. Even if it’s a made up person!

It can be nerve-racking picking single traits for a diverse audience. However, in the wise words of Syndrome from The Incredibles, “If everyone is super, no one will be.” If you don’t narrow your audience, you will end up building systems and marketing for nobody.

I recommend creating up to three User Personas. Three strategically created User Personas covers your important demographics. Not too many. Not too few. 

Once you have your User Persona created, it will be easier to understand their problems and create appropriate solutions for them, like how they would search for Easter information online. More on that in the next sections! 

I have created a FREE User Persona Creation tool. Please use at your leisure!

User Persona Creation Tool

Make Information Easy to Find

A core best practice of User Experience Design is to make information users are looking for quick and easy to find. If your info is difficult to find, users:

1. Are going to become frustrated

2. May spend more time than they want to searching for information

3. Might leave your website without the information they were looking for, thus missing out on that connection

4. May think less of your parish overall

5. May never come back to your website

So, how to make this information easy to find? I would recommend creating a new section for your homepage that summarizes this information. Place this as the second section of your website or if you have a slider for your hero section, put it there. Here’s an example wireframe:

Put more detailed information about your Lent and Holy Week on a new page where you have room to include more content. Create a new section for each offering. Link to this page from your new section that’s on your homepage.

Consider adding a new button or top-level navigation item to your navigation bar for even more visibility.

If you think your Lent & Easter page is getting a bit long, consider breaking it down into more subpages. If you do this, create a “home” or centralized page for all things Lent and Holy Week so everything is linked together.

Another way to answer this question is doing a mental exercise and asking your User Personas. How tech savvy are they? Where would they think to look first? Would they look in the same place as last year?

Consider Updating Related Information

If you have the bandwidth during this busy season, update or add practical information like parking, parish office hours, OCIA information (for catechumens, candidates, and their families), cry room details, which entrance to use, and more. You are likely to have a lot of out-of-towners looking to avoid certain headaches before they get there. Again, ask your user persona, “What are you going to be looking for on my website during Lent?”

Get Found on Google

Keep in mind people might be Googling “[Your parish] [activity]” Some examples: “St Mary's fish fry” “Immaculate Heart of Mary Holy Thursday”. Consider including your parish name in the text you use on your Lent/Easter webpage. Checking out your traffic analytics would help you even more.

A reminder to ensure your alt text, meta titles, meta descriptions are all updated.

Setting up plenty of links throughout your website will result in higher rankings on Google. For example, in your section about Easter Masses, you can add a button that goes to parking or cry room information. It also creates a more enjoyable user experience!

Get Festive!

Another way to help users find and enjoy your Lent and Easter content is to use imagery related to it. 

Purple is the color used during the season of Lent. Purple is also associated with royalty, which is appropriate considering Christ is King of the Universe!

Use photos of your parish and parishioners. Earn bonus points for using photos from last year’s Lent and Easter. Studies show users find your marketing more credible and engaging if you use photos of your parish and your parishioners!

If you don’t have photos, now’s the time to get them. Hire a professional or invite a parishioner to take some photos. If you can’t afford to pay someone, put an ad in the bulletin that you need help! Perhaps a tech savvy teen would do a great job.

Consider using imagery like nails, a hammer, wood, the crown of thorns, the Stations of the Cross, and more. Photos or illustrations. You can find free stock imagery at unsplash.com, pexels.com, or video.pexels.com.

As always, keep in mind your brand standards before applying any new visuals to your website.

In Conclusion

Some of my recommended changes might take more time than you want to even consider. However, whatever you create on your website can be reused and updated in a fraction of the time in the coming years. I would strongly recommend setting aside some time now to help create a smoother experience for your parishioners while they are planning their Lent and Easter.

Did I miss a tip? Let me know in the comments!

Any questions? Ask them below!