Cornerstone
Episcopal, Anglican and Lutheran parishes that keep the calendar
Church website templates that are actually free
10 complete templates — 77 pages of hand-written HTML — for parishes, chapels, benefices and cathedrals. Try any of them live, then we will email you the folder.
- MIT licence
- Live demos, no email
- No build step
- WCAG 2.2 AA
- Self-hosted fonts
Plainsong
Reformed and confessional congregations where the sermon is the centre
Threshold
Non-denominational and multi-site churches reaching people who have never been
Commons
Churches whose building is open and busy on weekdays
Lantern
Market-town parishes, retreat houses, and anywhere welcome is the message
Circuit
Benefices, circuits and groups of parishes sharing one ministry team
Canterbury
Church of England parishes keeping the daily office
Sanctus
Roman Catholic parishes
Bethel
Baptist and independent evangelical churches teaching through books
Chapter
Minsters, cathedrals and large historic churches with visitors as well as a congregation
What you actually get
A folder of files. That is the whole product, and it is deliberate.
Every page written
No placeholder text anywhere. Service times, plan your visit, weddings and funerals, giving — with real copy you edit rather than invent.
Plain HTML and CSS
Nothing to install, nothing to compile, no account to make. Unzip it, open index.html, and the whole site works offline.
They know the date
Liturgical seasons, movable feasts and benefice rotas are computed in the browser — so they stay right in a year nobody updates them.
Accessible and fast
WCAG 2.2 AA, checked by a script rather than by eye. Fonts are self-hosted, so no third party sees your congregation.
Guides
Choosing a builder, writing the pages, and what things actually cost.
Questions
Are these really free?
Yes, under the MIT licence — the permissive one. Use a template for your church, modify it, and never mention where it came from. There is no paid version, no locked page and no licence key. We ask for an email address so we can send you the files and tell you when a new template is ready; the demos need nothing at all.
Do I need to know how to code?
You need to be willing to open an HTML file in a text editor and change the words between the tags. That is genuinely it — no framework, no build step, no command line. If that sounds like more than you want to do, a hosted church website builder will suit you better, and the guides here compare them honestly.
Are these WordPress themes?
No. They are static HTML templates, meant to be uploaded to a host as a folder of files. A developer can convert one, and the markup is clean enough to make that a short job rather than a rescue mission.
What about the photographs?
Each demo uses photographs from Unsplash, and each folder carries a CREDITS file naming every photographer. You may keep them, but replacing them with pictures of your own church is the single biggest improvement you can make to any of these.
Where do I host it?
Anywhere that serves static files, and several will do it for nothing — Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, or ordinary shared hosting over FTP. There is no database and no PHP, so there is nothing to keep patched.
Pick one and start today
10 templates, every one free. Open any demo without giving us anything; tell us where to send the files and we will email them over.
All templates