The Best WordPress Sermon Plugins for Religious Organizations
Last Updated December 30th, 2023
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Building websites for churches, ministries, and religious groups is a constantly growing segment of WordPress development. Many WordPress freelancers, agencies, and marketing firms are building fully functional and community-focused websites for people of all faiths. One of the most requested features religious organizations ask for is a way to post, manage, and present sermons to their followers online. Building a sermon management tool can be time-consuming and expensive. Thankfully, the WordPress plugin ecosystem has come to the rescue. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular WordPress sermon plugins available today.
Popular WordPress Sermon Plugins
Sermon plugins are a small, but growing, niche in WordPress. The plugins we’ll be discussing here today are all available for free on WordPress.org. Several of them also have paid versions that offer additional features that you might find useful for your project. Regardless, these plugins (free or paid) offer many of the features you will need to implement sermons into a WordPress site.
Sermon Manager
Sermon Manager is by far the most popular WordPress sermon plugin out there right now. You can use this plugin to manage your speakers, their series or collection of sermons, the topics they discuss, and more. There is support for adding images to each sermon as well as MP3s and downloadable documents like PDFs. Sermon Manager integrates with the Bib.ly website as well for integrated viewing of Bible verses. This plugin integrates your sermon data on the frontend using shortcodes. The shortcodes are highly flexible with attributes. You will be able to control sermon presentations easily with this plugin.
Plugin Details
This product was initially published by its creator in October of 2011. It is now on version 2.30.0 and last saw a change on September 26th, 2024. The newest release runs on WordPress 6.5.5 and requires at least PHP 7.4 to operate on your server. This plugin is actively working on over 5,000 WordPress websites. It has had over 364,010 downloads. There have not been many support requests from customers. WordPress users are positive and think highly of this product.
Sermon Manager Pro is the name of the paid version of this plugin. The big feature in the premium version is templates to control how your sermons look. In addition to visual customization, Sermon Manager Pro includes built-in support and integration with all of the popular third-party page builder plugins. That means you can easily add sermons to sites built with Elementor, Beaver Builder, and WPBakery using the upgraded version of this plugin.
Church Content
The next plugin on our list is called Church Content. This plugin is developed specifically with themes from the ChurchThemes.com website in mind. It’s also compatible with some specific themes from other developers as well. Know in advance this plugin isn’t a universal solution. Now, having said that, this plugin does offer some great features if you don’t mind the theme lock-in involved. You can manage sermons, events, people, and locations using Church Content. Your sermons can have text, audio, video, and PDFs. You can also organize them by topic, series, or speaker. In addition to sermons, Church Content lets you build and add events to your site which is something that other plugins on this list can’t handle out of the box. This saves you from installing another WordPress event management plugin.
Plugin Details
This plugin was originally published by its creator in September of 2013. It is presently on version 2.6.2 and last underwent a revision on December 16th, 2024. The latest edition runs on WordPress 6.7.1 and requires at least PHP 7.4 to work on your server. This plugin is now working on over 4,000 WordPress websites. It has had over 151,560 downloads. There have not been many support requests from end-users. Reviews for Church Content – Sermons, Events and More are very positive. Many of the customers who left a piece of feedback found Church Content – Sermons, Events and More to be wonderful.
Church Content Pro takes the free plugin and expands it with additional features. The paid version supports sermon podcasts, repeating events, holidays, weather cancellations, improved SEO, and the ability to rename text settings. As with the free version, Church Content Pro requires a theme from the developer or from a list of third-party theme makers in order to work properly so keep that in mind.
Sermon’e
Sermon’e is the next WordPress sermon plugin we’ll be taking a look at today. This is an all-encompassing solution for posting sermons to a website built with simplicity in mind. The idea is that people of any technical background can use Sermon’e. Sermons can include video and audio files. You can upload these media files inside of WordPress or embed them from a site like YouTube. Each sermon can be tagged by series, speaker, or topic for better organization. Shortcodes are what drive the presentation on the front end and there are hooks available for developers to customize the plugin even further.
Plugin Details
This product was originally released by its owner in April of 2021. It is actively on version 1.0.0 and last experienced a change on April 28th, 2021. The newest release runs on WordPress 5.7.9 and requires at least PHP 7.2 to work on your server. This plugin is now running on over 3,000 WordPress sites. It has had over 2,750 downloads. There have not been many help requests from users. Sermon'e – Sermons Online does not have any reviews. It’s not easy to tell what the WordPress community thinks about it yet.
Advanced Sermons
Advanced Sermons is the next WordPress sermon plugin we’ll be looking at today. This plugin has all of the features the others on our list have. You can add and manage sermons on a site that include video, audio, text, and documents. They can be filtered by series, speaker, or topic and you can customize their look and layout directly inside of the plugin. Advanced Sermons has built-in analytics which you can use to monitor how many times each sermon is viewed right inside of the WordPress admin. This is a nice feature as regular analytics programs can sometimes be confusing and overwhelming for non-technical users.
Plugin Details
This piece of software was first released by its creator in July of 2019. It is presently on version 3.6 and last experienced an update on November 10th, 2024. The newest version operates on WordPress 6.7.1 and requires at least PHP 7.3 to function on your server. This plugin is currently running on over 1,000 WordPress sites. It has had over 25,060 downloads. There have not been many help requests from users. Reviews for Advanced Sermons are very positive. Many of the customers who left a review found Advanced Sermons to be great.
The paid version, Advanced Sermons Pro, has a lot of unique features you won’t find in other WordPress sermon plugins. It comes with alternative display options for showing lists of sermons. There is support for Facebook videos, adding Bible passages (including control of version and translation), and attaching bulletins to each sermon. You can adjust the actual URL, or slug, of the sermon archives with the paid plugin as well. Finally, Advanced Sermons Pro has the ability to manage speakers so you can include their information with each sermon on your site.
CP Sermons
CP Sermons is a powerful sermon management plugin designed specifically for WordPress. It offers a range of features and customizations to meet the needs of churches and make sermon management easy and efficient. One of the key features of CP Sermons is the ability to share sermons with your congregation. The plugin provides powerful categories and tags that make it easier for your congregation to find the right sermon. You can also use the Template Builder to create custom layouts that can be embedded on any page of your website. Additionally, the persistent player ensures that the sermon remains front and center while users browse the site.
In conclusion, CP Sermons is a comprehensive sermon management plugin for WordPress that provides churches with powerful tools for managing and sharing sermons with their congregation. With its customizable options and easy-to-use interface, it simplifies the process of sermon management and enhances the user experience for both administrators and users.
CP Sermons offers two purchasing options: the Single Plugin choice ($99/year), which includes CP Sermons with all its features, and the All Access Pass ($249/year), which includes additional powerful plugins to further your mission. Both options come with a hassle-free 30-day money-back guarantee.
What’s the Best WordPress Sermon Plugin for You?
There aren’t a lot of WordPress sermon plugins at the moment but the handful that exist are very powerful. We would suggest giving each of these free plugins a try. Find which one best fits your client and their needs. The paid, or premium, versions of these plugins also offer a variety of additional features that your client could find useful. The time you’ll save using one of these plugins will be appreciated by your team. And your client who will inevitably keep the cost of their website project down.
Finally, speaking of website projects, take a look at our White Label WordPress plugin. You can use our plugin to rebrand the WordPress admin and customize the experience. This can help to make life for your client easier. White Label has dozens of features that let you modify how the WordPress admin looks and feels. It supports changing the login page, creating your own admin color scheme, and replacing logos throughout the interface. This is an easy way to better match WordPress to your client’s branding. The plugin also supports hiding and renaming menus, adjusting how plugins are displayed, disabling notifications, and much more. It’s the perfect solution for white labeling WordPress.
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