Free Church Website: What "Free" Actually Gets You

A church plant with no software budget still needs a website before its first public service — somewhere the address, the service time and a way to make contact actually live. So free church website gets searched a lot, and it returns four quite different offers wearing the same word.

Getting them mixed up costs you either an unpleasant surprise in week three or a full rebuild six months later. Here's the honest version: what each kind of "free" really is, how to spot which one you're being offered, and what Ekkli's six months free covers.

The 45-second answer

Free church websites come in four shapes: a general website builder's free plan, a church-specific trial, an ad-supported host, and self-hosted open source. The general builders give you the most polished editor and the least church-shaped structure. The church-specific tools give you sermon archives and service times out of the box but almost always want payment eventually. Ekkli is the third of those four: six months free, then a paid plan.

The four kinds, and who each suits

General website builders on a free plan

Wix, WordPress.com and similar. Genuinely free indefinitely, with the provider's subdomain and branding. The editors are excellent and the templates are plentiful.

What you don't get is anything church-shaped. A sermon archive, a service-times block, a recurring events calendar and a rota all have to be built by hand out of generic components, then maintained by hand forever. For a church whose website is a shopfront and nothing more, that's a perfectly reasonable trade.

Church-specific tools on a trial

Built for congregations, so the structure is right from the first click — service times, sermons, events and giving are page types rather than things you assemble. Nearly all of them are time-limited, and thirty days is the norm.

Ad-supported hosts

Free, with someone else's advertising on your site. Uncommon for churches now, and worth avoiding for the obvious reason: you don't control what appears next to your service times.

Self-hosted open source

WordPress installed on your own hosting, or a static site. Around €3–5/month for hosting, no licence cost, complete control, and permanent — nobody can change the terms on you.

The cost is maintenance: updates, backups, security, and a person who knows how to do them. If your church has a willing technical volunteer who'll still be around in two years, this is the cheapest durable answer and we'd rather point you at it than pretend it isn't.

What Ekkli's six months includes

A live site on an Ekkli subdomain — yourchurch.ekkli.net — with the pages a church actually needs already in place rather than assembled from blocks:

• Home, About, Contact and free-form custom pages built from reusable content blocks
• A public events calendar with open RSVP, waitlists, a subscribable iCal feed, and an embeddable widget for another site
• A sermon audio archive with real seek and scrub, plus a video archive that normalises YouTube, Vimeo or Rumble links into privacy-respecting embeds
• News posts and photo galleries, with every upload auto-oriented and re-encoded to WebP
• Google Maps, video and social-feed embeds as page blocks
• A spam-protected contact form that stores nothing in the database
• Privacy and Terms pages, plus an Impressum automatically required for churches in Germany, Austria and Switzerland
• One H1 per page enforced by the layout, whatever the editor is told to do

The site is not a separate product from the rest of the platform — it runs off the same data as your member database, rotas and service plans, so the events calendar and sermon archive fill themselves in as you use the software.

What costs money

Two things sit behind a paid plan, and both are things that cost us money rather than arbitrary gates:

• Your own domain, mapped and verified with a live DNS check, and removal of the small "Powered by Ekkli" footer.
• Long-term media storage beyond the trial's 2 GB, and a podcast RSS feed for your sermon audio.

And after six months, the site itself needs a plan. There's no permanently free tier — that's the trade for getting the full thing, not a cut-down version, during the trial.

How to tell what you're being offered, in two minutes

1. Is a card required to start? If yes, it's a trial regardless of the word on the button.
2. What's on the URL? A provider subdomain is normal for free. Check what moving to your own domain later costs and whether your URLs change when you do — that's an SEO event.
3. Whose branding is on the page? A small footer credit is the usual price of free. Advertising is not the same thing.
4. Can you export the content? If the answer involves contacting support, assume you can't.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Ekkli website really free, or does it expire?

It's free for six months, then it needs a paid plan. There's no permanently free tier. If you need a website with no ongoing cost at all, self-hosted WordPress on cheap hosting is the honest alternative.

Can we use our own domain during the trial?

Custom domains are a paid-plan feature, so the trial runs on an ekkli.net subdomain. You can map your domain the moment you move to a plan, and we do the DNS check for you.

Will our URLs change when we move to a custom domain?

The path structure stays the same, so redirects are straightforward. It's still worth planning the switch before you've built up a lot of inbound links.

Do we need someone technical to set it up?

No. Pick a template, set colours and a logo, and the church-shaped pages are pre-filled from your platform data. Most churches have something presentable the same afternoon.

What happens to the site at the end of six months?

It stops being publicly served until you choose a plan. Your content isn't deleted, and a full export is available to you throughout the trial without asking support.