Search church linktree, or linktree for churches, and the pages that rank are not articles. They are churches: page after page of a congregation’s own link list, each a short stack of tiles that reads almost the same from church to church. Sermon. Next event. Connect. Prayer. Give.
The sameness is the useful part. The page has one job and a short, known list of things to put on it.
The five links a congregation actually clicks
Pew Research Center found in its November 2022 survey that 27% of U.S. adults regularly watch religious services online or on TV. A good share of your congregation meets the church through a screen before they meet it through a door, and the page behind your Instagram bio is that screen. Five tiles cover nearly everything it is asked to do:
- This week’s sermon, video or audio
- The next event, with its registration link
- A connect card for someone new
- A prayer request form
- The giving link
Order matters more than design here. Keep the sermon on top through midweek, then move the event up once the sermon is a week old. Zaap pages sit at zaap.bio/username and the handle is yours to set, so the address reads as the church’s name rather than a string of characters. Zaap also organizes links into widgets and folders instead of one flat list, which is what keeps a page carrying youth camp, a baptism class and a sermon archive from turning into scrolling.
A page that carries every link the church owns is a page nobody reads to the bottom. Cut it to five and rotate the rest.
Your website is built for visitors, your bio link is built for members
The Hartford Institute for Religion Research reported from its late-2025 national survey that median congregational attendance rose for the first time in 25 years. Those people are not reading your website. The website answers a visitor’s questions once: where you meet and what time. Members need this week’s schedule and this week’s sermon. They need it again next week.
The website is for the first visit. A church link in bio is for the rest of the year, when the content changes weekly and the audience already knows who you are.
Your congregation is also split across accounts. Pew Research Center puts YouTube use at 84% of U.S. adults in its 2025 fact sheet, and Facebook, Instagram and TikTok each hold a different slice of the same room. A church Instagram bio has one slot in it. One link works in every social media bio, and four different URLs do not.
Zaap syncs the page with your latest YouTube videos, Instagram posts and TikToks automatically, so Sunday’s stream shows up on Monday without anyone logging in. Link folders, embedded videos and a custom domain sit on the same page, so a sermon can play where the click lands.
You hold the giving link, your processor holds the gift
The Lake Institute on Faith and Giving puts giving to religion at $152 billion in 2025. Almost none of it moves through a link page.
Your giving page stays where it is: Subsplash, Church Center, Tithe.ly, whichever platform already holds your donor records and issues your year-end statements. Zaap holds the link to it and nothing else.
That is a deliberate limit. Money given to a church should land inside the accountability the church already has, and that accountability lives with your processor and your books. The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability accredits 2,700+ churches and ministries against its stewardship standards. A link page sits outside all of it, which is where it belongs.
The tile itself is one line of work: copy the URL your giving platform gives you, label it the way your church says it out loud, and keep it in the same position every week so nobody has to hunt for it.
| Tile | Where the click lands | Who runs the destination |
|---|---|---|
| This week’s sermon | YouTube, a podcast app, your sermon archive | Your video or podcast host |
| Next event | The registration page | Your church management system |
| Connect card | A form | Your ChMS, or a form block on the page |
| Prayer request | A form | Your prayer team’s inbox |
| Giving | Your giving page | Subsplash, Church Center or whoever you use |
The link page runs none of those systems. It owns the order they appear in, and whether a member can reach one in a single thumb press.
What Five14 and Journey put on the page
Five14 Church in New Albany, Ohio runs a public Zaap page at the handle five14church, and it is the clearest version of this pattern. The page carries events, small groups, kids’ curriculum, sermon playlists and two podcasts. Its Generosity tile links out to Subsplash. Prayer and volunteer forms point at Church Community Builder. One link, several systems behind it, and a visitor cannot tell where one ends and the next starts.
Journey Church in Cleveland, Ohio runs a shorter version at journeychurch: event registrations, a connect card, a give link.
The gap between those two pages is the lesson. Five14 has enough ministries to need folders. Journey does not have them and did not add them. Copy the shape that matches the size of your church, not the shape that looks most finished.
Folders, forms and a QR code for the bulletin
Zaap requires zero coding, so the person who builds this does not have to be the person who runs the website. Zaap’s Basic plan is free and Pro is $9 a month on monthly billing; the Zaap pricing page lists what each plan adds.
- Claim the handle at zaap.bio and set it to the church’s name, not an abbreviation only staff use.
- Add the five tiles, sermon first.
- Put seasonal links in a folder: Advent, VBS, baptism class. A folder keeps the top of the page short when a season adds a handful of links at once.
- Turn on email capture, which is the difference between a link page and a list you can reach.
- Print the QR code. A church QR code on the bulletin, on the welcome card and on the screen before service reaches the people already in the room.
One limit to plan around: the Contact Form block is a Pro feature. On the free plan, the connect card and prayer tiles link out to the form your church already uses, which is what most churches do anyway. Pro also sets page fonts and a custom favicon, if the page has to match the brand you print on everything else. Zaap’s link-in-bio tool covers the build itself.
The emails you collect are the point
Zaap’s lead magnet tools grow the list by trading something the congregation wants for an email address: the sermon notes, a Lent reading plan, the kids’ calendar for the term. Whoever downloads it is someone you can reach on a Thursday.
Sends are unlimited on every plan and the email builder works like a Notion document, which matters when the midweek update is written by a volunteer between other jobs. Zaap can publish blog posts to the same page, so a pastor’s letter has somewhere to live that is not a Facebook post nobody can find in March. Pair it with short clips cut from Sunday’s message, which is what gets shared. The trap is sending more. Weekly email that says nothing teaches people to ignore it.
Start with this Sunday
Build the page, put five tiles on it, and paste the link into your Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube bios the same afternoon. Print the QR code on next Sunday’s bulletin. If your church is moving off a link list and wants the comparison first, read Zaap as a Linktree alternative. If it is starting from nothing, the free page is enough to launch this week.
