Why Rebuild
The current site has served the church, but several structural issues are now working against its purpose.
What's Broken
- Broken icons across the nav - stray letters U/M/I and "3" badges appearing where icons should be. The icon font is failing to load.
- Half-finished homepage - a blank "Ministry Teams" area and overlapping ghost text suggest unfinished or corrupted Divi layouts.
- No real weekly-update feature - "Stay in the Loop" is only a mailto link. There is no form, no "this Sunday" preview, and no way for visitors to see what's happening this week.
- Built on Divi page builder - heavy, slow, and the direct cause of the broken icons and layout issues. The footer still reads 2023.
- No caching / single location - served from one plain Apache host with no caching layer, so every visitor loads everything fresh from one box.
The Good News
- The content is solid and worth keeping - clear mission statement, real ministries, sermon archives, and active Planning Center integration for giving and events.
- The church already uses Planning Center and YouTube, which are perfect foundations for an auto-updating site.
Zero-Touch Weekly Updates
The hardest part of a church website is keeping it current when volunteers rotate and none are technical. This plan removes that burden by making content flow automatically from tools the church already uses.
| Weekly content | Comes from | Volunteer effort |
|---|---|---|
| Events / calendar | Planning Center (already used) | None |
| Giving | Planning Center (live) | None |
| Sermons / livestream | YouTube (auto-newest) | None |
| "This Sunday" + announcements + prayer list | One simple form | ~2 min/week |
| Newsletter signups | Signup form to mailing list | None |
Both options below run on our Contabo VPS with a replica on USA servers - so visitors in Virginia are served from a nearby US box for fast load times, with HTTPS throughout.
Plan A - Astro on the VPS
Recommended. A custom modern site running on our Contabo VPS with a USA replica, edited through a simple form-based editor and rebuilt automatically when content changes.
Pros
- Fastest possible site - best Google ranking and SEO
- No database and no PHP - almost nothing to hack or patch
- Runs on the VPS we already operate - no new hosting bill
- Custom design, not a pre-made template
- No page-builder to break like Divi
Cons
- Editor (Sveltia) is less familiar than WordPress
- One-time editor and login setup required
- Brand-new page types need a developer - rare for a church
Plan B - WordPress, Done Right
Note: On our Contabo VPS (with the USA replica), WordPress runs natively - full, normal WordPress with server-side page caching. The old "static-export workaround" doesn't apply here. The trade-off is no longer can it run, but upkeep vs. speed.
Pros
- Familiar WordPress / Gutenberg editor
- Huge plugin ecosystem and tutorials
- Fully dynamic - no export or publish step
- Many people already know how to edit it
Cons
- Ongoing security patching (core + plugins) - the usual way churches get hacked
- Slower than Astro (PHP + database); server caching helps but doesn't fully close the gap
- Plugin bloat and breakage risk - exactly what broke the current Divi site
- Needs database + file backups maintained
Side by Side
| Astro | WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Contabo + USA replica | Contabo + USA replica |
| Security patching | Almost none (no PHP/DB) | WP core + plugins, ongoing |
| Backups to maintain | Just files (in git) | Files + database |
| Editor familiarity | Lower | Higher |
| Speed / SEO | Best | Good (with caching) |
| Risk of breaking | Very low | Moderate (plugins) |
Recommendation
Plan A (Astro). Both run on our VPS now, so the contest comes down to upkeep and speed. Astro has almost no attack surface (no PHP or database), is the fastest for Google, and won't break the way a plugin-heavy WordPress can - and the current Divi WordPress is exactly what's broken today. Because the weekly content auto-flows from Planning Center, the "WordPress is more familiar" advantage barely matters here. Plan B is still a reasonable choice if the church specifically wants the WordPress editor and is willing to fund the ongoing security upkeep.
Where the Church Stands on Google
Live search data, pulled 2026-06-03 and cross-checked against two independent tools (DataForSEO + Ubersuggest). The headline: Living Word is well-liked but under-found - it has the strongest review reputation in town yet loses the website race to a rival church.
Current footprint
Where 68 ranking keywords sit
- 9 in the top 3 almost all brand terms
- 9 on pages 1-2 close but not winning
- ~50 stuck on pages 3-7 effectively unseen
Three of every four ranking terms sit on page 3 or worse: real demand the church appears for but no one reaches.
| Measure | Today | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Keywords ranking on Google | 68 | Mostly the church's own name |
| Estimated monthly visitors from search | ~600-700 | Modest for the area (both tools agree) |
| Keywords in the top 3 | 9 | Almost all brand terms |
| Keywords stuck on page 3-7 | ~50 | Content not competitive enough to surface |
| Recent movement | 25 down / 13 up | Slipping, not climbing |
The map / local pack - "baptist church forest va"
This is the box of three churches that appears at the top of Google with the map. It drives the most "near me" visits. The three contenders for the box:
Google reviews: social proof
Living Word has twice the reviews of the church that currently outranks it. A reputation lead, not a deficit.
| Church | Rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Forest Baptist Church | 5.0 | 19 |
| Living Word Baptist Church | 4.8 | 38 |
| St Paul Baptist Church | 4.8 | 14 |
Map-pack order is not fixed - it shifts with each searcher's exact location and device. That is why you may see #3 while a metro-center scrape shows #2.
Map-pack rank by town - live, four locations
We pulled the live map pack from Forest, Bedford, Lynchburg, and Evington for three searches a real person would use. The pattern is stark.
Map-pack position by town & search
| "baptist church forest va" |
"baptist church near me" |
"churches in forest va" |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Forest | #2 | Not in pack | Not in pack |
| Evington | #2 | Not in pack | Not in pack |
| Bedford | #3 | Not in pack | Not in pack |
| Lynchburg | #3 | Not in pack | Not in pack |
in pack weaker (#3) invisible. One column green, two columns red: found only by people already searching the church's town.
The real problem: Living Word only appears when someone already knows to type the church's town and denomination ("baptist church forest va") - there it ranks #2-#3. For the two searches a newcomer actually uses - "baptist church near me" and "churches in forest va" - Living Word is invisible in all four towns, while Forest Baptist still shows up. The church is being found by people who already know it, and missed by everyone who doesn't.
And it isn't a reputation gap: Living Word has 38 reviews to Forest Baptist's 19 - twice the social proof, half the visibility. That gap is a Google Business Profile + website problem, which is fixable.
The website race (same search, blue links)
Below the map for "baptist church forest va", Forest Baptist's website ranks 1st; Living Word sits 5th-8th depending on the town. The rival's website is simply doing more of what Google rewards.
Blue-link rank on page 1 of Google
Position 1 takes the lion's share of clicks; positions 5-8 take a fraction. Closing this is the website half of the fix.
What's dragging it down
- Profile points to
http://www.lwbc.net- non-secure and the "www" split. Google sees two versions of the site and trusts neither fully. - No Church / LocalBusiness structured data - Google can't cleanly read service times, address, and ratings.
- Slow, broken front end - Divi bloat, dead icons, footer dated 2023. Both a speed penalty and a trust penalty.
- No CDN, thin pages - little of the "Plan Your Visit / what to expect" content Google ranks for.
Authority is light but not hopeless: Domain Authority 20 with ~157 backlinks (Ubersuggest). The local terms above are won more on Google Business Profile and on-page signals than on raw link count, so this is a clearable bar.
Full site crawl - what a page-by-page scan found
We ran a complete crawl of every page on lwbc.net (Screaming Frog, 2026-06-16). It backs up the search findings with hard on-page numbers.
| What we checked | Found | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Pages with no meta description | All 64 | Google writes its own snippet under every link - the church controls none of the text searchers read |
| Broken link (404) | 1 - /ministries/youth/ | A dead Youth ministry page; visitors and Google both hit a wall |
| Titles too long for Google | 15 | Cut off mid-sentence in search results, so the point is lost |
| Thin pages (under 200 words) | 16 | Too little content to rank for "plan your visit" style searches |
| Duplicate Divi blog URLs | 4 (?et_blog, paged copies) | Same content at multiple addresses splits Google's trust |
| Server response time | ~0.23s avg (fine) | The slowness users feel is Divi page weight, not the host - confirms a rebuild, not a bigger server, is the fix |
The takeaway: the host is fast enough - the problems are all on the page. Missing descriptions, a dead link, cut-off titles, and thin content are exactly what the rebuild fixes by default, and none of them require buying anything bigger.
The Plan to Get Found
The goal is simple: own the local searches, take the #1 map spot from Forest Baptist, and keep the reputation lead the church already has.
Target searches
Monthly search demand, US (log scale)
realistic local win huge volume, won via the map pack. Bars use a log scale: each step right is ~10× the demand.
| Search | Monthly volume (US) | Competition | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| churches in forest va / forest va churches | 320 | Low | Hyperlocal - a realistic win |
| churches in lynchburg va | 1,900 | Low | The biggest local prize |
| baptist church near me | 90,500 | Medium | Won through the map pack, not blue links |
| church near me | 1,500,000 | High | Map-pack play only - huge "near me" intent |
| baptist church forest va | Navigational | Brand term | Own it outright |
Search volumes are confirmed by two independent tools (DataForSEO and Ubersuggest agree to the exact figure). Competition is shown as Low/Medium/High because the tools' precise "difficulty scores" disagree - the local terms are genuinely low-competition either way, but no single difficulty number should be read as a guarantee.
Priority actions
- Fix the foundationLaunch the new fast site, force one secure address (
https://lwbc.net, retire the www/http split), add Church structured data, write clean titles and descriptions. - Win the map packOptimize the Google Business Profile - correct categories, hours, service times, fresh photos, weekly posts - so the church starts appearing for "baptist church near me" and "churches in forest va" (where it shows nowhere today), and climbs to #1 on the branded search. 38 reviews vs the #1's 19 is the wedge.
- Build the pages Google ranks"Plan Your Visit," service times, "what to expect," ministries, sermons - out-depth the rival's website.
- Local signals + citationsConsistent name/address/phone across directories, internal links, a clean sitemap submitted to Google Search Console.
- Measure monthlyTrack rankings, map-pack position, and Business Profile views; adjust.
Social, tied in
- One weekly update posts to the site, Facebook, and Instagram together - no double work.
- Sermons auto-share from YouTube.
Quick win
The church already out-reviews the #1 result. A foundation fix plus a focused Google Business Profile pass puts the #1 map spot for "baptist church forest va" genuinely in reach - before any long-term content work.
SEO + Google Business + social are offered as a small monthly management retainer on top of the one-time build.
Cost & Timeline
Cost Shape
- One-time build - design, pages, Planning Center wiring, editor setup, and deploy.
- Hosting - runs on our Contabo VPS with a USA replica that we already operate. Astro adds essentially no overhead; WordPress adds ongoing security patching + backups (folded into the optional retainer). Church covers domain renewal.
- Optional: monthly Google Business + SEO + social management retainer (also covers WordPress upkeep if Plan B is chosen).
Timeline
- Lock stack + sitemap + design direction Confirm Astro or WordPress, finalize page list, and establish visual direction.
- Build pages + wire Planning Center + sermons + forms Construct the site, connect live data sources, and test all integrations.
- Set up volunteer editor + 1-page how-to-post guide Train the weekly updater and leave a simple printed guide.
- SEO setup Search Console, Google Business, schema markup, and sitemap submission.
- Launch on the VPS Deploy to Contabo with the USA replica, point the domain, verify SSL, and monitor for 48 hours.