A 2014 church website rescued, without losing a single word

The challenge

Bellicose Church is a Kansas City church organized around missional communities. Its mission is simple: “The Kingdom Of God. In All Of Life. Together.”

The website hadn’t kept up. It dated to 2014, ran on an aging platform with a dated theme on budget hosting, and its security certificate had expired. Anyone who visited saw a browser warning before they saw the church. For a lot of people, the website is the first visit, and this one was turning them away at the door.

The content itself was worth keeping. Years of carefully written pages explained the church’s mission, beliefs and leadership. Starting over and rewriting it all wasn’t an option. And staff needed a way to keep events, leaders and documents current without calling in help every time.

So the job had three parts: get the church off the old site safely, carry over every word exactly as written, and hand staff a church website they could run themselves.

What we built

Every word carried over, and checked

We moved every word of the existing copy over unchanged, then verified it automatically: 688 out of 688 content chunks matched. Not a word was lost.

We also protected the church’s links. Ten old URLs now redirect permanently, including some we only found by digging through Google’s crawler logs and the Wayback Machine. Bookmarks, old bulletins and search results all still land in the right place.

Sermons where people already listen

The aging self-hosted podcast feed and an unused newsletter signup were retired. Sermons now live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and the sermon archive on the site. Giving stays on Planning Center through Church Center, so nothing changed for the people who give.

A staff admin that matches how a church works

Staff can manage elders, deacons, lead partners, events, contact messages, and public and private PDFs. Everything has draft and published states, plus visibility controls. A few details save real time:

• Elder bios update themselves. Ages and years married stay current automatically.
• Events repeat the way church events do. Anything from weekly to annual, including rules like “3rd Thursday of each quarter,” with a preview of upcoming dates.
• Replacing a PDF keeps its URL. Printed and shared links never break when a document is updated.

Accessible for the whole congregation

The new site offers three color themes: default, light and dark. We checked contrast across 82 color pairs and the site has 0 accessibility violations. Every page has a single main heading, where the old home page had four.

Bible references become hover previews through RefTagger. The contact form has spam protection, and notifications are sent without touching the church’s own email setup. Analytics are privacy-friendly.

Built to be found

Good church website design includes the parts visitors never see. Search engines now understand Bellicose as a church and an organization, along with its next three upcoming events, its elders and its teaching audio. We verified the map coordinates, explicitly allowed AI search crawlers, and backed it all with 38 automated tests. We also re-encoded oversized images during the move, saving about 25 MB. One was a 6.4 MB PNG.

The result

Visitors to bellicosechurch.org now see the church, not a security warning. Every word the church wrote is still there, every old link still works, and the site is accessible on any device. Staff can update events, leaders and documents themselves, and recurring events take care of their own calendar.

What staff no longer have to worry about:

• Visitors bouncing off a browser security warning
• Updating an elder’s age or anniversary by hand every year
• Re-entering the same monthly or quarterly event over and over
• Broken links on printed materials after a PDF is updated

Churches and nonprofits, let’s talk

If your Kansas City church website, or any church or nonprofit site, is aging, insecure or hard to update, you don’t have to start from scratch. We can carry over what you’ve already written, keep the tools you already use like Planning Center, and give your staff an admin they’ll actually use. Reach out and tell us where things stand.