The State of Australian Church Websites 2026

The headline

of Australian churches have no working website of their own

6,436 of 13,356. That is 5,542 holding no website address at all, plus 894 holding one that does not reach them.

Why the number moved

A link on file is not a website

Before this audit, the figure for Australian churches carrying a website was 58.6%. After testing every address, the figure for churches carrying a working website was 51.8%.

The gap of 6.8 points is made entirely of links that had stopped working and that nobody had checked. A directory, a denominational finder or a Business Profile records an address once and rarely tests it again.

At a glance

Four numbers

Geography

The divide is geographic, and the gradient does not break

Repeats inside 10 of the 11 denominations large enough to test separately. A remote Catholic parish is 3.4 times more likely than a Sydney one to have no working website.

Denominations

Two different problems wear the same label

The left column needs a first website. The right column needs a repair, and most of that list costs minutes per church. National decay average is 11.4%.

How they die

Churches rarely break their websites. They let them expire.

The largest single failure class is a domain that has stopped resolving altogether: 465 churches. Lapsed domains outnumber broken pages by 2.6 to 1.

A 404 can often be repaired by walking up to the site root. A lapsed domain cannot be recovered at all, and anyone else can buy it.

The hazard

An expired church domain becomes somebody else's asset

Of 310 church addresses that redirected elsewhere, 7 landed on gambling sites, a fitness spam farm, a French wine estate or a placeholder, with the church's name still attached.

One gambling site served the path /en/generic/geranium-plain-lutheran-church/, which passes any automated check that reads the destination address. The page title said "Generick Fitness Online Coaching".

The sites that work

Not the problem people assume

Church websites are not stuck in the desktop era. The remaining problem is machine-readability: a person can read these sites, and almost nothing else can.

The largest gap

The service times exist. Nothing can read them.

4,998 churches publish a service time on their own homepage. 347 have one in machine-readable form.

52.5% of working church sites carry no structured data at all. Without JSON-LD, a service time on a page is a sentence, not a fact, and answer engines mostly decline to guess.

What to do

Three audiences, three actions

• A denominational office: start with your decay rate, not your coverage. 40 repairs in this report needed only a www prefix toggled, and 31 needed a text string deleted. Then audit any domain you host congregations on.
• A church: type your own address with and without www, and with https. Then ask whoever maintains the site for ChurchService or Event JSON-LD. It is a one-off change.
• Anyone publishing a directory: a recorded address is not evidence of a website. Test on a schedule, read the page rather than the address, and never condemn a site on a single failed fetch.

Method

How this was measured

• Census of one directory, not a sample. No official register of Australian churches exists.
• Every network failure retried 3 times. Every non-alive verdict re-probed in a second pass after the sweep finished, with the second verdict winning.
• That second pass rescued 45 sites that had failed the first. Single-pass verdicts are worthless.
• Run on Python 3.12 with OpenSSL 3.6, because the system Python reports live sites as certificate failures.
• Limits, exclusions and the reproduction scripts are stated in full in the report.

auschurches.com.au/research/state-of-australian-church-websites-2026