Church landing page: when a newcomer gives up

Someone who has just moved to a city and wants a Sunday service searches for churches nearby. They land on a page with a warm headline and a photo of a congregation, and they scroll for the times. The times sit in a weekly bulletin, a PDF that opens as a long document on a phone, or in a footer that is cut off on a small screen. The map shows a pin with no service time next to it. They leave for a church with clear times. The office staff know the schedule by heart, so the gap is invisible from inside.

• On a phone, can a newcomer find the Sunday start time without scrolling past the photo?
• Is the address written as text on the page, or only inside a map that may not load?
• Search the page for 'Sunday'. Does a time appear in text, or only inside a bulletin file?
• Does the first visit form ask about membership before it asks for a name and a preferred day?

A newcomer arriving from a search wants, first, the Sunday start time, the street address, and a sense of what happens when they walk in, such as where to park, what to wear, or whether children have their own class. Each one is a small question, and each often lives somewhere else: the times in a bulletin, the address in a map, the arrival details on a page nobody links to. They close the tab and try the next church, which is an easy choice when the others list the time on the first screen.

Find the cause by looking at the first screen on a phone in a private window, then scrolling once. Ask whether you can say the start time and the address after that one scroll. If you cannot, the cause is placement, not design. Then search the page for the word Sunday. If the only hit is inside a PDF, the cause is the file. A simulated visitor runs the same first screen and records the step where it could not find the time.

Many church pages embed a map and treat it as the address. On some phones the map loads slowly, or it stalls behind a consent prompt, and the address was never written as text. A visitor who cannot see the map has no address at all. An office that checks the page on a laptop sees the map load at once, so the gap stays hidden from them.

Test it with the map blocked. Open the page on a phone with the map area not loaded, then look for the address anywhere else on the page. A plain address line near the times fixes the cause, and the map can stay for people who want directions. The run records whether the address was readable on the page, with a screenshot of the section where it looked for one.

A first visit form is meant to tell the church that someone is coming. Many forms ask first whether the person is a member, which family they belong to, or which group they serve. A newcomer has no answer to those. They wonder whether the form is only for members, and they leave, or they write a false answer just to submit. Ask for a name, an email and a day they would like to come. Ask the rest after the visit.

Check the form by filling it as a new person with no history with the church. Read each required field and ask whether a newcomer would know the answer. If a required field asks for something a visitor cannot give, the cause is the form, and the fix is to make that field optional or remove it. The run shows which field stopped the visitor.

A new season, a new bulletin file or a map update can push the service times back into a PDF, and the first screen can change without anyone checking it on a phone. Rerun the newcomer path after each seasonal change. Check the first screen in a private window on a phone with the map blocked, because a broken map is often the first thing a newcomer sees go wrong.