When a church tells me their online presence "doesn't work," my first assumption used to be that the website itself was the problem — outdated design, slow to load, hard to navigate. Sometimes that's true. More often, the website is fine. What's broken is everything happening around it that nobody designed on purpose.
The social media accounts were set up by whoever volunteered five years ago and haven't changed hands cleanly since. The giving link changed platforms at some point and half the printed material still has the old one. The volunteer sign-up process exists in three different forms depending on which staff member you ask. None of these are website problems. They're coordination problems that happen to live online.
Why a New Website Rarely Fixes This
This is the trap I've watched a lot of churches fall into: the frustration gets pointed at the website because that's the most visible piece, so the response is a full redesign. Six months and a few thousand dollars later, there's a beautiful new site, and the giving link is still wrong on the church sign out front, because nobody thought to check the sign.
A website redesign fixes the website. It doesn't fix the fact that the church's digital presence is actually a scattered collection of accounts, forms, and links maintained by different people with no shared source of truth.
What Actually Helps
The churches that feel like they've gotten this figured out usually aren't the ones with the fanciest sites. They're the ones with one clear, current link that everything else points back to — on the sign, in the bio, on the bulletin, in the email footer — so that even when three different volunteers are managing three different platforms, they're all pointing at the same current information instead of whatever version they last remembered. That's a smaller fix than a redesign, and it's usually the one that actually closes the gap people are feeling.