Christ Preparatory Academy Assessment

This FREE website assessment is for Christ Prep at http://christprep.com. It was completed by Brave New Church Website Services in order to help those who run the program see what can be done to spread their message more effectively using the internet.

Framework
This is a Wordpress website. That's a good content management system. My resources show that it's currently a Wordpress 3.9 site (2014). That's a problem because updating the website to the current version of Wordpress is usually critical for security, but it's also generally not that difficult. Here's the list of missed updates for the Christ Prep website: https://wordpress.org/news/category/releases/ .

Since it's an older website and the admin page is readily accessible, hackers may try to get in and mess up the generally nice website. The website's speed might also be a result of using an older version of Wordpress. I guess it's not a big surprise, however, since Kroma Marketing (the web builder) has a website with a 2014 copyright.

Mobile-Friendly
This website is mobile-friendly, so that's good, and it means that a framework update might be the only concern. However, it's possible this older theme is not compatible with a newer version of Wordpress.

Other Issues

The only reason I looked more into this website was because it was slow to load. As you can see from the Google Pagespeed test, it get's a 48/100 on mobile. I have to admit that some of my own websites that I use for personal blogs don't do a lot better than that, but here's what the web developer of the Christ Prep website has to say about it:

That chance typically lasts about 5 seconds with your website. Having an outdated or poorly designed website can be a detriment to your business both on and offline and may possibly turn customers away.

It's ironic because the website I found is not updated and won't even load in five seconds. And the web developer's own website gets a 25/100 score on Pagespeed, which pretty much makes me think they're no longer in business, especially sporting a Wordpress 3.5 website from 2013.

I have to admit that I do not love website speed tests. I think it's OK if a beautiful website loads slow sometimes. But there are some glaring concerns in this particular case.

Some of the speed issues might be about the images in the slider. One was 2.3 mb. That's a lot of data usage for an image I was able to resize to 615 kb without any real loss. I know from experience that image sliders can kill a website's speed.

Read my book A Simplified Guide to Church Websites: Purpose, Planning, and Presentation