The 5 Types of Church Website Visitors (And What Each One Needs)

It is a Saturday night in October, a little after nine, and five people are on the same church's homepage.

A woman in her thirties who has not prayed in years is reading the "About" page for the third time this week. She has not told anyone she is doing this.

A couple who closed on a house across town on Tuesday are sitting on boxes in the living room, comparing three churches on two phones. They were Methodists back home. They would like to stay Methodists if they can.

A man who was an usher at this church for eleven years, and then stopped coming after his divorce, is looking to see whether the 10:30 is still at 10:30. He is also, though he would never say it, looking to see whether the pastor is still the same pastor.

A longtime member is trying to find the link for tomorrow's livestream because her hip is acting up.

And a college student is reading the "What We Believe" page because his girlfriend asked him to come with her on Sunday, and he wants to know what he is walking into before he agrees.

Same page. Same hero image of smiling people. Five completely different questions.

Most church websites are written as if one person is visiting them. This post is about the five who actually are, what each one needs, and how a church (and the digital greeter on its website) can serve every one of them without building five separate websites.

Why think in types at all

In 1999 a software designer named Alan Cooper published a book with the wonderful title The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. In it he argued that the reason so much software was miserable to use was that it was designed for "the user," a vague, average person who does not exist. His fix was to design for specific, named people instead, and he called them personas.¹ The idea took over the software industry, because it works. It is very hard to write a good page for everyone. It is much easier to write a good page for Dana, who just moved here and has a four-year-old.

Churches figured this out a long time before the software people did. A good greeter at the door does it without thinking. They can tell the nervous first-timer from the member who is just running late, and they say something different to each. Paul described the instinct when he wrote, "I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some."² He did not change the message for each audience. He changed where he started.

A website cannot read faces. But it can be built with the faces in mind, and that starts with knowing who they are.

The five types at a glance

Now a closer look at each one.

1. The seeker

Who they are. Someone who is curious about God, or faith, or church, and does not quite have words for why. Maybe something happened. A death, a diagnosis, a baby, a long run of feeling empty. Maybe nothing happened, and they just keep thinking about it.

There are more of them than most churches assume. In a 2022 Barna survey of 2,000 American adults, three out of four said they want to grow spiritually.³ That is not three out of four Christians. That is three out of four adults.

Evangelical churches have a long history with this person. In 1993 Lee Strobel, a former atheist and then a teaching pastor at Willow Creek, wrote Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary, and a whole generation of "seeker-sensitive" ministry grew up around trying to understand them.⁴ Catholic parishes meet the same person in OCIA (the process many people still call RCIA). Anglicans and Lutherans meet them in inquirers' classes, Orthodox parishes in catechism, and lots of churches across the board through Alpha or a newcomers' lunch. Every tradition has a door for this person. The trouble is that most seekers never make it to that door, because the website did not tell them it was there.

What they are really asking. Is it okay for someone like me to come? Will I know what to do? Will someone make me talk? Will they be able to tell?

Nicodemus came to Jesus at night.⁵ Seekers still do. A lot of them are reading your site after the kids are in bed, privately, often without telling their spouse yet. They are not ready to fill out a form. They might not be ready to come for months.

What they need from your website.

• A plain description of what happens during a service, start to finish, with how long it lasts.
• Explicit permission to just watch. "You don't have to sing, stand, or say anything. Plenty of people come for a while before they do any of that." One sentence like that can do more than an entire page of welcome language.
• A way in that is smaller than Sunday. A livestream they can watch on the couch, a class for people with questions, a coffee with the pastor or priest.
• Real photos of real people, so they can see whether anyone there looks like them.

Where church websites usually fail them. Insider words. "Join us for Connect Groups after the Gathering in the Commons." Or, in a more traditional church, "Coffee hour follows the 10:00 Eucharist in the undercroft." To a member, either one is a perfectly normal sentence. To a seeker it is a riddle, and every riddle is another small sign that this place is for people who already know the code. We collected a dozen side-by-side rewrites of exactly this kind of copy in church website copy that actually sounds human.

What a digital greeter should do. Answer the small, slightly embarrassing questions without making them feel small. "Do I have to be baptized to come?" "Can I just sit in the back?" "What if I start crying?" A seeker will ask a box on a screen things they would never ask a person in a lobby, at least not yet. The answer should be warm, short, and true, and it should never push them toward a form they did not ask for. There is more on this person's frame of mind in the hidden psychology of the first-time visitor.

2. The relocator

Who they are. Someone who already goes to church, just not yours, because until recently they lived somewhere else. A new job, a military move, retirement near the grandkids, a first apartment after graduation.

This is the most common way people end up looking for a church at all. When Pew asked Americans about it, about half said they had looked for a new congregation at some point in their lives, and the single most common reason was that they moved. Roughly a third of all adults said they had gone church hunting because they relocated.⁶

What they are really asking. Is this my kind of church? And then, once that is settled, is it a good one?

Relocators know what they are looking for. They are not asking "what is church," they are asking "what is this church." They want to know your tradition and whether you are in the same branch of it they came from, which matters a lot more to a lifelong Missouri Synod Lutheran or a Southern Baptist or a PCA Presbyterian than it does to anyone who did not grow up in those worlds. Catholics want Mass times, confession times, and the Spanish or Latin Mass if they had one back home, and they want to know how to register with the parish. Someone coming from an Assemblies of God or Church of God in Christ congregation wants to know whether worship here is Spirit-filled or reserved. A family raised in the AME church or a National Baptist church may be looking for a congregation that feels like the one they grew up in, and a family from a big nondenominational church may be looking for one that doesn't feel like a denomination at all. An Orthodox Christian may need to drive forty minutes to find a parish in their jurisdiction, and wants to be sure before they make the trip. A Baptist family may be wondering how to move their membership by letter. A military family is trying to figure out whether they should get settled here at all or wait for the next set of orders.

Pew also asked what people weighed once they started looking. The quality of the preaching came first (83 percent said it mattered), followed closely by feeling welcomed by the clergy and lay leaders, then the style of worship, then location, at about seven in ten.⁶

What they need from your website.

• Your tradition and denomination named plainly, ideally on the homepage. If you belong to a specific body (the ACNA rather than the Episcopal Church, the Global Methodist Church rather than the UMC, the SBC, the PCA, a particular diocese), say so. Relocators are often looking for that exact word.
• A recent sermon they can actually play. This is how they test the preaching, which is the thing they care about most.
• An honest description of worship style. Hymns, a choir, a gospel choir, a praise band, chant, the liturgy you follow, how long it lasts, how formal it is.
• Kids and youth details, since relocating families are usually choosing for everyone.
• What joining looks like: membership classes, registration, transferring a letter, whatever your version is.

Where church websites usually fail them. Being vague on purpose. Lots of churches play down their denomination, sometimes for good reasons. But to a relocator, a site that never says what you are reads as either evasive or careless, and they have two other tabs open. One interesting detail from the same Pew study: people said online information mattered far less to their final decision than visiting in person did.⁶ That fits what we see. Your website is not going to win the relocator by itself. Its job is to get you on the shortlist of churches they visit on Sunday. Being unclear is the fastest way off that list.

What a digital greeter should do. Speak the relocator's language, literally. "Do you do weekly Communion?" "Are you open or close communion?" "Is the 8:00 a Rite I service?" "Do you use the ESV?" These are tradition-specific questions, and a generic answer is worse than none. (We wrote a whole piece on why church AI has to know your denomination for exactly this reason.)

3. The returner

Who they are. Someone who used to go to church, maybe this one, and stopped. They might have drifted during a hard season, or during COVID, or during college. Maybe they were hurt. Maybe there was a divorce, or a move, or a pastor they did not get along with. And now something is pulling them back. A new baby they want baptized. A parent who died. Christmas. Just a feeling.

This group is enormous. In The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis and Michael Graham, working with sociologists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, estimate that about 40 million American adults who once attended church at least monthly now go less than once a year.⁷

Here is the part that should get every church's attention. For the largest dechurched group they studied, the most common reason for leaving was not doubt, or scandal, or politics. It was that they moved (22 percent). For dechurched mainline Protestants, it was 25 percent.⁸ Many of today's returners are yesterday's relocators who never found a new church home. Which means the way your website treats the relocator this year is shaping how many returners you have in five years.

The same research found that 51 percent of dechurched evangelicals said they were somewhat or very willing to go back to church.⁸ Half. Right now.

What they are really asking. Can I come back without it being a big thing? Is anything different? Will people ask where I've been? Am I still welcome after what happened?

For a returning Catholic, there is often a specific, quiet question underneath: Can I receive Communion? Do I need to go to confession first, and when is it? For someone who was divorced, or who left after a falling out, there is a whole set of questions they will not ask out loud.

What they need from your website.

• Current information they can trust. The returner remembers how it used to be, so outdated pages are not just unhelpful, they are confusing. Is the 10:30 still the 10:30? Is that still the pastor, or the rector, or Father Tom?
• A staff page that is up to date, with photos, so they can see who is still there and who is new.
• Something that says, in plain words, that people come back all the time and it is fine. Even a short "Coming back after a while?" section on your visit page will be read more carefully than anything else on the site by the person it is for.
• For Catholic parishes and other sacramental churches, reconciliation times that are easy to find and current.

Where church websites usually fail them. Treating them like a first-time visitor, or not thinking about them at all. A returner does not need the full "What to Expect" tour. They need to know what has changed, and they need to feel that the door was never locked.

Jesus told a story about this person. The younger son is walking home, rehearsing his apology speech, and "while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him."⁹ The father did not wait at the door with a clipboard. He went out to the road. For most returners today, the road is a phone at 11 at night, and your website is the first thing that sees them coming.

What a digital greeter should do. Not ask why they left. Answer what they asked, gently, and make the next step small. If they hint at something heavier (a divorce, a hurt, a death), the right move is to offer a real person, not to try to handle it in a chat window. Greetyr flags those conversations for church staff so the people who should be holding them can.

4. The member

Who they are. Your people. They already go to your church, and they are on your website all the time, probably more than all the other four types put together. They are not deciding anything. They are just trying to get something done.

What they are really asking. Where is the thing I need this week? The giving link. The livestream. The prayer request form. The youth group schedule, because it changed again. The sign-up for meals for the family that just had twins. The bulletin. Mass intentions. The Wednesday night supper menu. Faith formation registration. Which room the women's Bible study moved to.

They also do something very important that most churches forget: they send your website to other people. When a member invites a coworker, the coworker's first look at your church is very often the link the member texted them.

What they need from your website. Speed. Usability research has shown for decades that people rarely read web pages. In Jakob Nielsen's early studies, 79 percent of test users scanned every new page and only 16 percent read word by word.¹⁰ Members scan harder than anyone, because they already know what they want. Give them the five or six things they use every week in one place, near the top or in the menu, labeled the way they actually talk about them.

Where church websites usually fail them. There are two opposite failures, and most churches have one or the other.

The first is the website that is entirely for members. The homepage is a wall of announcements, the stewardship campaign, the men's retreat, the parish festival, the building fund thermometer, and the service times are in the footer. Members are happy enough. Every other type on this list is lost. (This is common enough that we wrote a whole piece on why most church websites are built for members, not visitors.)

The second is the website that was redesigned for visitors and hid everything members need. Giving is three levels deep. The calendar is gone. The church office now gets fifteen calls a week asking where the livestream link went.

The fix is to give members a clear, short lane (a "Members" or "Quick links" spot with giving, livestream, calendar, prayer, and sign-ups) and keep the front of the homepage for people who have never been.

What a digital greeter should do. Act like the helpful person at the welcome desk who knows where everything is. "Is youth group on tonight?" "What's the link to give?" "When is the next baptism class?" A greeter that answers those in a few seconds takes real load off the church office, and members are often the first people to notice when it works.

5. The skeptic

Who they are. Someone who is not sure they believe any of it, and is checking you out anyway. Often not by choice. They are coming because a spouse or a girlfriend asked, because their kid wants to go to Vacation Bible School or wants to be confirmed with their friends, because a friend's wedding or a funeral is in your sanctuary, or because they are a seeker who is still braced for a sales pitch.

There are a lot of them. Pew's most recent Religious Landscape Study found that 29 percent of American adults are religiously unaffiliated: atheists, agnostics, and people who say they are "nothing in particular."¹¹ When Pew asked people with no religion why, the most common answer was that they question a lot of religious teachings (60 percent). Next was that they do not like the positions churches take on social and political issues (49 percent), and then that they do not like religious organizations (41 percent).¹²

Back in 2007, Barna's research for unChristian asked young non-Christians what words described present-day Christianity. Eighty-seven percent said judgmental. Eighty-five percent said hypocritical.¹³ Many of the people who were in that survey are now in their thirties and forties, with kids who want to go to your Wednesday night program.

What they are really asking. Are these people honest? Will they let me think? Is there a catch?

They are reading for tone as much as content. They want to know whether you will be straight with them, and they are watching for any sign of bait and switch, like a "come as you are" homepage with a very different set of expectations hidden two pages in.

What they need from your website.

• A beliefs page in plain words, not just a scanned confession or a list of proof texts. It can be short. It does have to be clear.
• Honesty about the things they are probably going to wonder about. You do not need a position paper on every hot-button issue. But if your church holds a view that a newcomer would want to know about before getting attached, being upfront about it is a kindness, not a liability. The skeptic will find out eventually. The only question is whether they hear it from you, early and gently, or discover it later and feel misled.
• A place for questions. A "Hard Questions" page, a class, an email address with a real person behind it. Tim Keller's The Reason for God grew out of the questions skeptics kept bringing to his church in Manhattan. In it he wrote, "A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it."¹⁴ A church that is not afraid of questions comes across very differently to someone who has a lot of them.
• No pressure. No pop-up asking for their email in the first ten seconds.

Where church websites usually fail them. Overselling. Every church calls itself welcoming, authentic, and life-changing, and skeptics have read a thousand marketing pages. Superlatives make them trust you less. Plain, specific, slightly understated language makes them trust you more.

What a digital greeter should do. Give straight answers. If someone asks "Is your church LGBTQ affirming?" or "Do I have to believe all of this to come?", a dodge is worse than an honest answer. The greeter should answer from what your church has actually said in its own words, and hand off to a real person when a question needs a real conversation. It should never argue and never try to close a sale. Peter's instruction is still the best guidance anyone has written for this: "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect."¹⁵

The same person, three tabs later

These five types are a tool, not a set of boxes. Real people move between them, sometimes inside one evening.

The skeptic who is coming for his girlfriend is also, quietly, a little bit of a seeker. The member who stopped coming eighteen months ago is now a returner, and she knows the website better than the new pastor does. The relocating family is also trying to figure out whether their teenager, who has privately become a skeptic, will hate it there.

And as the dechurching research shows, a relocator who does not find a church in their first year often stops looking, and becomes a returner five or ten years later, if they come back at all.

So don't try to sort every visitor into a category. Just make sure that whichever of the five a person happens to be tonight, their question has somewhere to land.

What this means for your homepage

You do not need five websites. You need one website with five doors that are easy to find. In practice that looks like:

1. The first screen belongs to the stranger. The next service with a date, the address, and a button to plan a visit. This serves the seeker, the relocator, and the returner all at once. (Here is the anatomy of a good plan your visit page.)
2. Name your tradition where relocators will see it. A short line under your church's name usually does it. "An Anglican church in downtown Spartanburg." "A Catholic parish of the Diocese of Charleston since 1891."
3. Add one paragraph for people coming back. On your plan your visit page, a small section titled something like "Been away for a while?" Keep it short and kind. It costs ten minutes to write.
4. Give members a lane. Giving, livestream, calendar, prayer requests, and sign-ups in one obvious place, separate from the front door.
5. Have a beliefs page a skeptic would respect. Plain words, honest about what you hold, and an invitation to ask questions.
6. Make every type able to ask a question. A phone number and email with a real name attached, a reply within a day (see the 48-hour rule), and some way to get an answer at 11 at night, when a lot of these people are actually looking.

Where a digital greeter fits

A web page cannot tell who is reading it. The seeker and the skeptic and the member all see the same hero image and the same welcome paragraph. That is a real limit of pages, and no amount of good copy fully gets around it.

A digital greeter does not need to know which type someone is. It just needs to listen to the question. The question tells you. "What do I wear?" is almost always a newcomer. "Is Father Mike still there?" is almost always a returner. "Where's the giving link?" is a member. "Do you ordain women?" could be a relocator or a skeptic, and it deserves a clear answer either way.

That is how we built Greetyr. It is a digital greeter that reads your church's own website and answers each visitor's actual question in your church's words, at whatever hour they ask, in the tradition you actually belong to. When a question needs a person, like grief, a crisis, a hard story, or someone who wants to talk to the pastor, it says so and connects them with your staff instead of pretending to be one. And it keeps a running list of what people asked that your website could not answer well, so you can see which of the five are slipping through.

But you can start without us. The exercise below is free.

Try it tonight: five sticky notes

Write the five types on five sticky notes. Then open your church's website on your phone, in a private browser window, and read the homepage five times, once as each person.

• As the seeker, can you tell what happens on Sunday and that it is okay to just watch?
• As the relocator, can you tell what kind of church this is within ten seconds?
• As the returner, is everything on the first screen current, and is there anything that says welcome back?
• As the member, can you find the giving link and the livestream in two taps?
• As the skeptic, does anything on the page sound like a sales pitch? Can you find what this church actually believes?

Each "no" goes on a list. If you want to go further, our step-by-step 10-question website audit walks through a whole afternoon of this.

A table with room for everyone

There is an old line people repeat in churches of every kind: the ground is level at the foot of the cross. The seeker, the relocator, the returner, the member, and the skeptic all come in through the same front door, and they all need the same grace once they get there.

But they do not all arrive on the same road. The church that notices the different roads, and meets each person on theirs, is the church that has room at the table for every one of them.

Frequently asked questions

What are the types of church website visitors?

Most people who visit a church website fall into five broad types: the seeker, who is curious about faith and wondering whether church is safe for them; the relocator, a churchgoer who has moved and is looking for a new church home; the returner, someone who used to attend and is thinking about coming back; the member, who already attends and needs to find information quickly; and the skeptic, who doubts or disagrees but is checking the church out, often because of someone they love. Each needs different things from the same website.

Who visits church websites the most?

Members are usually the most frequent visitors, because they use the site every week for giving, livestreams, the calendar, and sign-ups. But a church website's most important job is serving the people who have not been yet: seekers, relocators, returners, and skeptics. The most effective church websites give members a quick, clear lane and keep the homepage focused on newcomers.

What do first-time church visitors look for on a website?

First-time visitors look for service times, the address and where to park, what happens during the service and how long it lasts, what to do with their kids, what the church believes, and what they are expected to wear or do. Relocators also look closely at the church's denomination, worship style, and a recent sermon.

How can a church website welcome people who have been away from church?

Keep service times, staff, and photos current, since returning attendees remember how things used to be. Add a short, kind section to your plan your visit page for people who have been away a while, letting them know people come back all the time. For sacramental churches, make confession or reconciliation times easy to find.

How should a church website talk to skeptics?

Use plain, honest language instead of marketing superlatives. Have a beliefs page written in everyday words, be upfront about convictions a newcomer would want to know about, and give people a real way to ask hard questions. Avoid pressure tactics like pop-ups that ask for an email right away.

What is a church visitor persona?

A visitor persona is a short description of a specific type of person who visits your church or website, such as a family that just moved to town or someone returning after years away. Designers have used personas since the late 1990s to make sure a website serves real people instead of an imaginary average visitor. For churches, personas help you check whether your website answers the questions each kind of visitor actually brings.

Can a church website adapt to different kinds of visitors?

A static web page shows everyone the same thing, so the best you can do is give each type of visitor a clear path. A digital greeter on the website goes further by answering each person's actual question in the church's own words, whether they are a member looking for the giving link or a skeptic asking what the church believes.

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Greetyr is a digital greeter for church websites. It answers visitors' real questions in your church's own words, day or night, and hands anything pastoral to the people in your building who should be holding it. If you are rethinking who your website is for, start with the questions every church visitor is already asking and the digital front door.

Footnotes

1. Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Sams, 1999). The book introduced personas as a practical design tool. See: Alan Cooper, Wikipedia. ↩

2. 1 Corinthians 9:22 (ESV). ↩

3. Barna Group, "A Majority of U.S. Adults Desires a Spiritual Dimension to Life. Are Christian Leaders Ready?" (January 18, 2023). Online survey of 2,000 U.S. adults, October 21 to 31, 2022: "three out of four (74%) say they want to grow spiritually." See: barna.com. ↩

4. Lee Strobel, Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary: How to Reach Friends and Family Who Avoid God and the Church (Zondervan, 1993), with a foreword by Bill Hybels. ↩

5. John 3:2 (ESV). "This man came to Jesus by night." ↩

6. Pew Research Center, "Choosing a New Church or House of Worship" (August 23, 2016). About half of U.S. adults have looked for a new congregation; "roughly one-third of adults say they have searched for a new place of worship because they relocated." Among those who looked, 83% said the quality of preaching was important, nearly as many said feeling welcomed by clergy and lay leaders, about three-quarters said the style of worship, and seven in ten said location. The report finds online information "far less important" to the final choice than visiting in person. See: pewresearch.org. ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Jim Davis and Michael Graham, with Ryan P. Burge and Paul A. Djupe, The Great Dechurching: Who's Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? (Zondervan, 2023). "Dechurched" is defined as someone who once attended at least monthly and now attends less than once a year. See also the authors' summary in Outreach Magazine. ↩

8. ChurchLeaders, "What 40 Million Dechurched Americans Say About Why They Left," summarizing The Great Dechurching. Mainstream evangelicals, the largest dechurched group, most often stopped attending because they moved (22%); dechurched mainline Protestants left because they moved (25%); 51% of dechurched evangelicals said they were somewhat or very willing to return. See: churchleaders.com. ↩ ↩²

9. Luke 15:20 (ESV). ↩

10. Jakob Nielsen, "How Users Read on the Web," Nielsen Norman Group (September 30, 1997): "79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word." See: nngroup.com. ↩

11. Pew Research Center, 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (February 26, 2025). Survey of 36,908 U.S. adults; 29% are religiously unaffiliated, including 5% atheist, 6% agnostic, and 19% "nothing in particular." See: pewresearch.org. ↩

12. Pew Research Center, "Why America's 'nones' don't identify with a religion" (August 8, 2018). Reasons cited as important: question a lot of religious teachings (60%), don't like the positions churches take on social/political issues (49%), don't like religious organizations (41%). See: pewresearch.org. ↩

13. Barna Group, "A New Generation Expresses its Skepticism and Frustration with Christianity" (2007), research for David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, unChristian (Baker, 2007). Among young outsiders ages 16 to 29, 87% said present-day Christianity is judgmental and 85% said hypocritical. See: barna.com. ↩

14. Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Dutton, 2008), Introduction, p. xvii. ↩

15. 1 Peter 3:15 (ESV). ↩