Most church website advice is written for churches with a staff member called "communications director." This is for everyone else. Here is what belongs on a small church's website, in order, and the popular things that are better left off.
Put on, in this order
1. Service times, at the very top. Not in a menu, not behind a click. Roughly half of first-time visitors come to the site for exactly this. If your times are the fourth thing on the page, three wrong things came first.
2. Where you are. Full address, a directions link that opens the map app, and the one human sentence GPS cannot give: "the white church at the top of the rise, gravel lot beside the fellowship hall."
3. What to expect. Three short answers: what do people wear, what happens with kids, how long is the service. Write it like you would say it on the porch. "Some of us wear boots, some wear Sunday best. God is not checking, and neither are we" beats a page called Frequently Asked Questions.
4. Real faces. One photo of actual people from your actual church is worth five stock photos of a lit-up stage. No photos at all? A well-set page with your name, your words, and your times still works; a page full of strangers from a photo service quietly reads as false.
5. Your beliefs, in your own words. Not a linked PDF. A visitor checking whether you are their kind of church will read three paragraphs. Write the three paragraphs.
6. A way to reach you that gets answered. One phone number or one email that a real person checks beats a contact form nobody monitors. If you list a prayer line, honor it like one.
7. This week. One small, current thing: the sermon title, the potluck, the schedule change. A single fresh line tells a visitor the lights are on. This is also the hardest one, which brings us to the leave-off list.
Leave off
Anything you cannot keep current. An events page whose newest event ended in March is an anti-testimony. If nobody will update a thing, do not publish the thing. Fewer, truer sections beat many stale ones.
The bulletin as a PDF. Phones hate PDFs. Put the three announcements that matter on the page as text; skip the scanned bulletin.
A photo carousel that plays itself. Rotating banners look busy in a sales meeting and unreadable in a hand. One good photo, standing still, wins.
Member-only clutter. Committee rosters, internal calendars, the password-protected page nobody remembers the password to. The website's audience is the person who has never walked in. Serve them first.
Borrowed grandeur. Countdown clocks, smoke-machine stage photos, "watch our global broadcast." If it does not sound like your church on a Sunday, it will not read like your church on a screen.
The quiet rule underneath all of this
A visitor is not grading your design taste. They are asking one question: "if I show up Sunday, will it be okay?" Every element above either answers that or gets in its way.
And the maintenance rule underneath THAT: a church website is not a project, it is a chore, the gentle kind, like sweeping the steps. Pick whatever tool or service makes the chore lightest for the actual humans in your building. If the answer is "none of us will ever do the chore," pick a service that does the sweeping for you. That is exactly why we built Parson, where updating the site is just sending it an email, but whoever does your sweeping, make sure someone does. The steps show.