Blog

Church Web Hosting Rated and Ranked

Which church web hosting providers are the best?

We surveyed customers using our church WordPress themes to ask them to rate and provide feedback on different aspects of the web hosting company they use. 200 churches responded, giving us plenty of data to rank web hosting providers with. This list of hosting companies will help your church make the best choice and avoid getting stuck with a bad host.

We are including web hosts that received at least three responses for in our survey. Most of the churches are using providers that are not specifically church web hosting. By that, I mean they are hosting providers in general. There are very view church web hosts. What a church needs is good hosting, so let’s take a look at who does and doesn’t meet that need.

Making Maps Easier

We’ve been spending the last few weeks making it easier for you to add maps to your events and locations.

Church Web Hosting Survey

July 20, 2016
Steven Gliebe
News
3 Comments

Update: The survey ended and we published Church Web Hosting Rated and Ranked

We need your help. Please take our quick survey on your experience with web hosting for your church website. It will only take about 8 minutes.

How to Fix “This page didn’t load Google Maps correctly” Error

Are you seeing “This page didn’t load Google Maps correctly” in place of maps on your website? This error has become a lot more common since Google Maps started requiring an API key on June 22, 2016 (after about 10 years of allowing keyless use). If you started using Google Maps on your website on or after that date then you will need to sign up for and implement a free API key (older users still do not need a key).

Google has not made setting up an API key a very user-friendly process. Their interface is geared towards developers. As such, many users have trouble correctly creating a key. This guide is not just for our WordPress theme and plugin users but for anybody on the Internet who wants to know how to fix the “This page didn’t load Google Maps correctly” error on their website.

Updates for Google Maps

We have released updates to all themes and the Church Theme Content plugin which all of our themes rely on. The main purpose of these updates is to make it possible for you to enter your Google Maps API Key. This will resolve an issue new users were seeing with Google Maps not displaying.

Easier Maps and Event Registration URL

Two new features have been added to the Church Theme Content plugin with the release of version 1.6. One makes maps easier to generate and the other helps you link our to a third-party event registration service. Here’s a quick summary of each feature.

Maintenance Releases — Going 100% SSL

All of our themes and plugins have been updated. The changes include minor improvements and bug fixes. Go to Dashboard > Updates to update. We recommend always running the latest version of your theme, plugins and WordPress for a more stable and secure website. If you haven’t updated to WordPress 4.5 yet, this is a good time (our themes and plugins are compatible).

The primary reason for these maintenance releases relates to our switching to 100% SSL here on churchthemes.com. Now all pages use the https protocol instead of http. This means all data transferred between your browser and our website is encrypted. We formerly used SSL only on sensitive pages like your account area, payment screen and contact form. Now the entire site is covered and we’re one of only 6.5% of sites that score an A+ on SSL security.

Theme Updates for WordPress 4.4

WordPress 4.4 has been released and contains many great new features. WordPress is in general very backward compatible but sometimes it is necessary for a theme or plugin to be updated in order to deal with a change made in a new version of WordPress.

Maranatha: Beautifully Innovative New Theme

Maranatha has come.

After many months of design, development and testing, our newest WordPress theme for churches is available. We celebrated our two year anniversary last month and have learned much from working with thousands of churches since launching. Maranatha is the result of what we’ve learned churches and church website visitors really need.

Maranatha has all the same core features as our other WordPress themes such as sermons, events, people and locations. Let me explain the innovations that make Maranatha different and better.

Major Theme Updates Released

All of our themes have received a major update. It is important to update to the newest version before WordPress 4.4 is released in order to avoid the possibility of seeing an error. This is not only a compatibility update, though. There have been improvements made to sermon media downloading, a new email field for locations, translation improvements, performance optimizations and more. Read on to find out what’s new.