Blog Posts

December 2025 Update

We've been hard at work since our last post on October 29, 2025. Here's a quick snapshot of changes that are now live across all church websites:

Removed the third-party font we were using by reverting to system fonts. This results in initial page load times reducing slightly, as that third-party font was loading via CDN.
Reduced the number of database queries the site uses. This too results in faster execution on all page loads.
Added sitemaps to each church website (enabled automatically), helping to improve a church's search engine ranking.
Released an initial calendar …

Ad experiment for acquiring traffic

Building a new product can be nerve-racking—what if you got it wrong and there's little to no demand for the product you're building? Obviously, the ideal situation is to have users using your product as early as possible, validating that there is in fact a product market fit. Unfortunately, getting traffic and users organically can take a significant amount of time, both in duration and effort.

While browsing SermonAudio the other day, I noticed they have a few promotional tools for promoting a sermon or an external website. Even better, they let you create a text-based ad, which is …

Welcome to Watering Can Church Pages

We've been working on Watering Can Church Pages for a few weeks now, and while it’s still a little rough around the edges, there’s a simple, working version up and running. Current features include:

Custom pages: Church staff can create custom pages using our web-based interface, with content is written in Markdown—no HTML knowledge required.
Free subdomain: Churches can use a subdomain on wateringcan.org, removing the cost and complexity of registering a separate domain.
Instant publishing: Pages go live on your church's subdomain as soon as they're published—no separate web …