I know that upgrading any paid services for a church can be a real arm twister. I am all about saving money and maximizing how much the church spends on anything, but sometimes you can save more by spending more.
Let me explain.
The top two obstacles facing Church IT is volunteers and funding. The real pickle about this, is usually you can function fairly well if you have at least one of these. If you have volunteers, you can get away with spending less. If you can spend more, then you can get away with fewer volunteers. Of course, you can only imagine how awesome it would be to have both! Here’s where upgrading your church website services can help both areas: finances and volunteers.
My Experience
The last few months has been a real character building exercise for me, as ChurchMag has become my full responsibility. I’ve found myself facing the same issues a church tech team would be facing: a lack of manpower and funding. Because of this, my first approach was to try and do everything myself and to save money at every turn.
I quickly found this to be a bad idea.
Here’s the thing. Your website is an investment. Whether it be a business or church, time and money is spent. Sure, it’s digital and you can’t hold it in your hands, but the time and energy put into it is valuable. Why not spend a little more money to protect that investment? We talk about being good stewards, but when most people talk about it, they mean, “cheap.” Don’t be cheap.
Website Power-Ups
Here are a few things I’ve done to sure-up ChurchMag:
- VaultPress Premium Backup
Realtime Backup, Automated Sire Restore, Priority Disaster Recover & Concierge Support, Daily Security Scanning & Notifications, and more. - WP Engine Hosting
Malware Scanning, Daily Backups, Firewall, Built-in Caching & CDN. - Dedicated IP & SSL WordPress Admin
Could I have gone cheaper?
Yes.
In fact, I did at first and regretted it!
Church Vans & Websites
The amount of time I have saved has more than paid for the increase I now pay for premium hosting and backups. Plus, I was putting the entire investment of ChurchMag at stake. We insure our church vans and buildings, why not our church websites? We install security systems in our church, why not our websites?
Of course the investment of the church website will vary from one church to the other, and I’m not saying that your church should use the best of the best on everything. I’m not using these top notch services on websites of mine that are worth far less than ChurchMag, but I can tell you that I’ve upgraded them and added new systems that keep them safer and more secure (I’ll explore these services more on ChurchMag, soon).
Upgrade
Now you’re probably wondering how spending all of this extra money will save you any.
Let me ask you, how much does it cost to rebuild a website?
How much does it cost to re-write X-number of blog posts?
And how much does it cost the moral of your church IT team to undervalue their time, energy and commitment?
It’s time to upgrade.
[Images via Great Beyond via Compfight cc, Sudden Fiction via Compfight cc & FlySi via Compfight cc]
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