For churches, offering sermons via a website is a great way to engage more people and create more meaningful connections. Streaming sermons and making them available for on-demand listening can get your message out to a wider audience and make it easier for anyone to keep up with your latest sermons.
If you’re looking for the best WordPress plugin for church sermons, you have plenty of options to choose from. Each plugin has its own features, some of which may be better suited to your needs than others. We’ll walk through some of the options you can try, so you can find the one that best suits your church’s needs.
Table of Contents
Best WordPress Plugin For Church Sermons
Church Content – Sermons, Events and More
This is a free WordPress plugin that we and several other church theme developers use. This plugin also handles events, locations and profiles. The one feature nearly all churches use is sermons so it’s most definitely a sermons plugin. It requires a compatible theme. This means the integration is tight. Your sermon archive will seamlessly match your site’s design. Switching between compatible themes is made easy.
The plugin is brilliant in every way. Everything you could possibly want on your church site. . . the support was always right there if we needed it.
Barbi Atkinson, WordPress.org Review
WP Sermons – Easy, Beautiful & Powerful
WP Sermons is a sermons WordPress plugin under development by the makers of the Church Content plugin. That’s us. The idea is to take everything churches love about sermons with the Church Content plugin and our themes and make it available for use with any theme. It will be easy to use with a thick feature set and made to work seamlessly with virtually any theme. It will be compatible with WordPress’s new Gutenberg editor, popular page builders and provide other handy integrations.
Visit the WP Sermons site to enter your email and get notified when it’s released. We’ll have a tool to help you convert from another sermons plugin. Also read our article titled Best Sermons Plugin for WordPress: Building It to learn more about the project and the plugin’s features.
Sermon Manager – Popular Free Option
The Sermon Manager WordPress plugin is totally free so it is worth considering if your church is without a budget for a paid solution. This plugin has been around for a long time. The company behind it has changed ownership several times. It was acquired again recently so keep an eye out for new development. The prior owner invested a lot in getting it on the right track. A paid version with support and additional features is available.
Sermon Manager Pro – More Features & Help
Support is not always available with a free plugin. The paid version, Sermon Manager Pro, includes support and extra features like more customization options, multiple sermon podcasts and modules for popular page builders like Divi, Elementor and Beaver Builder. If you like the free version of the Sermon Manager plugin but want to do more and get extra help then Sermon Manager Pro is a consideration.
Series Engine – Popular and Full-featured
Series Engine launched many years ago and is still popular. It was the only paid sermons plugin for some time and that probably explains why it is still around (free plugins tend to wane). The developer maintains it consistently. Series Engine seems to be the current favorite as far as paid plugins go ($99). I’ve seen it in use in many church sites. It has a comprehensive feature set, supports some of the major page builders and has useful converters for switching from other plugins like Church Content and Sermon Manager.
If you’re not using a ChurchThemes.com theme with the Church Content plugin then I recommend Series Engine until WP Sermons comes out. Series Engine is popular among Divi theme users.
Started out with sermon manager. But switched to series engine which is a little more versatile and has good customer support.
Jennifer Wilson, Facebook Comment
Easy Sermon Hub – Low Cost Option
Easy Sermon Hub is a low cost option for publishing sermons with WordPress ($69). It supports audio and video with taxonomies for topics, series, preachers, books and services. Here’s a screenshot of adding a sermon from the Easy Sermon Hub website.
Advanced Sermons – New Kid on the Block
This plugin came on the scene recently. I gave this one a quick test and found the presentation to be nice. As a new plugin, it does not have as many features as Series Engine but looks like it’s off to a good start. We’ll have to watch and see how far development goes with this plugin. There is a free version on WordPress.org and a paid version for $50 that adds features like search results, an accent color option, filter options and related sermons.
There is a discussion on the WordPress for Churches Facebook Group with first impressions.
What really sold us what the plugin not only looked and displayed beautifully unlike the other plugins we have looked at, but the functionality is great as well!
maxologymarketing, WordPress.org Review
Sermon Browser – A Past Favorite
The Sermon Browser plugin is an older and much-loved plugin still available on WordPress.org. It was developed by Mark Barnes, a pastor, before WordPress introduced custom post types. Custom post types let a plugin developer make a “sermon” post type. Sermon Browser uses blog posts since that is all that it could use when it was first made. The plugin served its purpose well for a good while but is now outdated. I recommend using one of the other sermon plugins here.
SermonPress – An Outdated Option
I had not noticed this plugin on WordPress.org until doing research for this article. It has only 30 active users and no updates in two years. One thing I notice that is interesting is that it has a Series Index. Not every sermons plugin does. Here’s a screenshot from WordPress.org.
Perelandra – Another Outdated Option
Apparently an ode to the C.S. Lewis “space trilogy”, Perelandra Sermons aims to be the “ultimate sermon manager that allows you to display your sermons, beautifully”. It was exciting to see a new entry into the field of sermon WordPress plugins but this one never gained traction. It has only 50 active users at the time of writing and has not been updated in three years. I would consider this one discontinued and choose an option that is more up to date.
Perelandra solves a few problems simultaneously. It makes it easy to manage audio / video, as well as grouping sermons into series and navigating that. Default styles rock too!
wordpress church themes free
1. Church Lite – Free Church WordPress Theme
Church Lite is first on our list, which offers a fair number of features for a free theme. It includes a modern design that can be customized in a wide number of ways and will suit any church website well. The design is easy to customize and could be adapted for non-religious non-profits as well. If you’re looking to get a website launched quickly, this theme is a good choice.
2. Faith Blog – Free WordPress Theme for Churches
Next up is the Faith Blog theme, which is another standout choice for churches, houses of worship, and even general lifestyle websites. It’s intended use is for blogs, of course, so if you enjoy the design featured here, you can customize it to suit any niche or industry.
That being said, the design this theme comes with is fairly generic, so you may not need to make very many customizations at all to get a personal blog off the ground. Advertisement
3. Charity Zone – WordPress Theme for Churches
And then there’s the Charity Zone WordPress theme. Though not intended for churches specifically, it facilitates donations and would serve religious institutions well. It has a design that appeals specifically to a variety of nonprofits, volunteer organizations, and religious facilities.
It’s multipurpose at its core, however, and you could easily leverage that (as well as the fundraising platform) to create a donation drive for a variety of causes. A few standout features include call-to-action buttons, sliders, custom headers, and SEO integration.
4. Prayer Lite – Free Church WordPress Theme
Or, perhaps you’d rather consider the Prayer Lite theme, which is centered around facilitating charitable giving. It integrates well with popular donation and fundraising platforms and has a modern design that’s easily customizable. Use it for your church or for any other non-profit endeavor. You could even use it to create a one-time event website with fundraising capabilities.
5. Faith – WordPress Theme for Churches
Another great option is Faith, a theme that’s designed with churches specifically in mind. For a free theme, it’s actually packing quite a few features including robust compatibility with popular page builders including Beaver Builder, Divi, Brizy, Elementor, and so many more. It also offers a lot of flexibility in the layouts for the homepage and slideshows.
Conclusion
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