United States
Seven in Ten American Churches Have No Website
A count of all 334,555 congregations in the directory
We counted every congregation in the directory: 237,225 of 334,555 American churches — 70.9% — have no website. The gap runs from 84.2% in South Carolina to 49.0% in New Hampshire, and splits traditions by nearly forty points.
Americans search for churches near me more than a million times a month. When they do, most of the churches they are looking for cannot answer, because they are not there to be found.
We counted every congregation in this directory — 334,555 of them, in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Only 97,330 have a website. The other 237,225 — 70.9 percent — have no web address of any kind on record: no site, no landing page, nothing a stranger could open at eleven o'clock on a Saturday night to learn what time the service starts.
- Churches counted
- 334,555
- With a website
- 97,330 (29.1%)
- Without one
- 237,225 (70.9%)
- Widest gap
- South Carolina (84.2%)
- Narrowest gap
- New Hampshire (49.0%)
That is not a rounding error at the edge of the data. It is the majority condition of American congregational life, and it is unevenly distributed in ways that map onto geography, tradition, and the age of a building.
The gap by state
In South Carolina, 7,099 of 8,431 churches — 84.2 percent — have no website. In New Hampshire the figure is 49.0 percent. Both numbers describe the same country.
The pattern is regional before it is anything else. Every state above 79 percent is in the South, the Great Plains, or Appalachia; every state below 58 percent is in New England, the urban Northeast, or the interior West. The Bible Belt has the most churches and the fewest of them online.
All fifty states and DC
Sort any column by clicking its heading. Filter by state to jump to yours.
| State | Churches | No website | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| South Carolina | 8,431 | 7,099 | 84.2% |
| Mississippi | 7,008 | 5,855 | 83.5% |
| West Virginia | 3,898 | 3,248 | 83.3% |
| Tennessee | 10,471 | 8,612 | 82.2% |
| Oklahoma | 6,672 | 5,399 | 80.9% |
| Wyoming | 992 | 798 | 80.4% |
| South Dakota | 1,515 | 1,217 | 80.3% |
| Louisiana | 7,372 | 5,856 | 79.4% |
| Texas | 23,267 | 18,474 | 79.4% |
| Alabama | 9,976 | 7,771 | 77.9% |
| Ohio | 15,714 | 12,212 | 77.7% |
| Virginia | 10,236 | 7,792 | 76.1% |
| Utah | 1,302 | 989 | 76.0% |
| Arkansas | 5,689 | 4,291 | 75.4% |
| Pennsylvania | 17,007 | 12,727 | 74.8% |
| Wisconsin | 6,256 | 4,589 | 73.4% |
| Oregon | 3,978 | 2,908 | 73.1% |
| Vermont | 583 | 424 | 72.7% |
| Kentucky | 6,768 | 4,787 | 70.7% |
| Indiana | 9,288 | 6,556 | 70.6% |
| Georgia | 13,427 | 9,447 | 70.4% |
| North Carolina | 16,249 | 11,388 | 70.1% |
| Iowa | 5,166 | 3,602 | 69.7% |
| Washington | 5,927 | 4,132 | 69.7% |
| Missouri | 8,687 | 5,991 | 69.0% |
| Nebraska | 2,883 | 1,988 | 69.0% |
| Kansas | 4,915 | 3,388 | 68.9% |
| North Dakota | 1,454 | 994 | 68.4% |
| New York | 12,739 | 8,659 | 68.0% |
| Rhode Island | 536 | 363 | 67.7% |
| Idaho | 1,673 | 1,132 | 67.7% |
| Illinois | 13,817 | 9,172 | 66.4% |
| Alaska | 902 | 595 | 66.0% |
| Florida | 14,963 | 9,768 | 65.3% |
| Hawaii | 1,047 | 683 | 65.2% |
| Montana | 1,618 | 1,045 | 64.6% |
| Delaware | 1,091 | 698 | 64.0% |
| California | 21,472 | 13,526 | 63.0% |
| Michigan | 11,550 | 7,219 | 62.5% |
| Maryland | 6,111 | 3,783 | 61.9% |
| New Mexico | 1,908 | 1,179 | 61.8% |
| Nevada | 892 | 538 | 60.3% |
| New Jersey | 6,318 | 3,775 | 59.7% |
| Maine | 1,414 | 822 | 58.1% |
| Minnesota | 5,828 | 3,354 | 57.5% |
| District of Columbia | 643 | 369 | 57.4% |
| Arizona | 3,200 | 1,794 | 56.1% |
| Colorado | 4,169 | 2,302 | 55.2% |
| Connecticut | 2,835 | 1,500 | 52.9% |
| Massachusetts | 3,708 | 1,930 | 52.0% |
| New Hampshire | 986 | 483 | 49.0% |
| United States | 334,555 | 237,225 | 70.9% |
The gap by tradition
Tradition separates congregations more sharply than geography does. The spread runs from 48.6 percent to 87.5 percent — a gap of nearly forty points between the most and least connected large traditions in America.
| Tradition | Churches | No website |
|---|---|---|
| Church of God | 11,477 | 87.5% |
| Methodist | 24,830 | 77.2% |
| Baptist | 74,721 | 76.5% |
| Church of Christ | 11,626 | 76.5% |
| Non-Denominational | 35,729 | 74.6% |
| Assemblies of God | 7,336 | 73.7% |
| United Methodist | 15,174 | 71.9% |
| Christian | 8,866 | 69.6% |
| Lutheran | 17,216 | 65.1% |
| Presbyterian | 9,877 | 63.2% |
| Episcopal | 8,112 | 56.6% |
| Catholic | 25,275 | 48.6% |
Catholic parishes are the only large tradition where a majority are online, and the reason is structural rather than cultural: a parish belongs to a diocese, and dioceses build and pay for parish websites centrally. The Church of God congregations at the other end of the table are mostly small, independent, and responsible for their own infrastructure. Where a congregation has to buy and maintain a domain out of its own offering plate, it usually does not.
Rural and urban
Metropolitan churches are online more often than rural ones, but by less than the stereotype predicts — under ten points.
Two out of three churches inside a metropolitan statistical area still have no website. The gap is real, but it is a difference of degree inside a condition that is close to universal. This is not a rural problem with an urban exception; it is a national default with a mild urban discount.
The buildings that can least afford to be invisible
Among the 2,175 congregations in this directory whose buildings are listed on the NRHP, 1,178 — 54.2 percent — have no website.
These are not ordinary buildings. A National Register listing qualifies a rehabilitation for a federal tax credit worth 20 percent of qualified costs, with state credits often adding ten to twenty-five points more. That is precisely the kind of money that is found by someone who went looking — a preservation officer, a grant committee, a developer weighing an adaptive reuse. None of them can find a building that has no page.
- Flatlands Reform Church — Brooklyn, New York. Founded . Greek Revival.
- Christ Church Oyster Bay — Oyster Bay, New York. Founded . Carpenter Gothic.
- Saint James Episcopal Church — Flushing, New York. Founded . American colonial.
- Old Donation Episcopal Church — Virginia Beach, Virginia. Founded .
- Christ Church — Port Republic, Maryland. Founded .
A congregation that has kept a building standing since 1660 has solved harder problems than a domain name. The absence is rarely neglect. It is more often that nobody in the congregation has been the person whose job it is.
Why the gap matters now
The timing is unkind. American congregations are closing faster than they are opening: Lifeway Research counted roughly 4,000 Protestant closures against 3,800 openings in 2024, the first clear crossover. Higher figures circulate — projections of 15,000 closures a year — but MinistryWatch has argued convincingly that the largest of them are overstated. The direction is not in dispute even where the magnitude is.
For many people, the first interaction with a church happens online, before they ever walk through the doors.
Put the two facts side by side. More than a million people a month type churches near me into a search box. Seven in ten of the churches they might have visited have no page to arrive at. Some fraction of those searchers are people in a hard week looking for a room with the lights on, and the building four blocks away — which would have welcomed them — never appeared.
What a church without a website can do this week, free
- Claim the Google Business Profile. It costs nothing, takes about ten minutes, and it is what actually answers a near me search. The correlation above suggests this is the single highest-leverage act available.
- Publish service times somewhere permanent. A Facebook page that has not been posted to since 2019 answers no questions. One page with an address, a service time, and a phone number outperforms it.
- Claim the directory listing. If your congregation is in this directory, you can take control of the entry and correct it yourself; if it is missing, you can add it. Both are free.
- Say who to call. A named person and a working number is worth more than a designed homepage nobody updates.
How we counted
Every figure on this page was counted directly from the Churches List production database on , across all 334,555 congregational records.
Method, limits, and what would change these numbers
A church counts as having a website if its record carries a non-empty website address. We did not test whether each address still resolves, so the true share with a working site is somewhat lower than 29.1 percent, not higher. Every error in this measurement runs in the same direction.
Three limits worth stating plainly:
- A social media page is not counted as a website. Many congregations without a domain do maintain a Facebook presence. That is a real distinction — a page inside a walled platform behaves differently in search than a site a congregation controls — but readers who consider Facebook sufficient should read these numbers as an upper bound on invisibility.
- Directory coverage is uneven between traditions. Traditions that do not maintain individually named public listings for each congregation are under-represented here. This is why we have not published per-capita rankings alongside these figures: the denominator would be doing work the data cannot support.
- The Methodist rows are a pre-schism snapshot. A quarter of United Methodist congregations received permission to leave the denomination during a five-year window that closed this month. Our Methodist and United Methodist rows have not yet been re-verified against that realignment. Treat them as counts of buildings, not of current affiliation.
The underlying directory is available for research and commercial use, with a free sample and a per-field data dictionary, on our dataset licensing page.
Sources
- Churches List directory, 334,555 congregational records, counted 31 July 2026.
- Lifeway Research — church closures eclipse openings in the U.S.
- MinistryWatch — Are 100K churches closing in America?
- PBS NewsHour — A quarter of United Methodist churches in U.S. have left during split
- National Trust for Historic Preservation — Transitioning older and historic sacred places
- Church Search Trends — search volume for "churches near me"
The figures in this article may be reproduced with attribution to Churches List and a link to this page. If you are writing about this and want a cut of the data we have not published — by county, by denomination within a state, or by building age — write to the editors and we will prepare it.