European Church Tech Index — 7 August 2026
84% of UK churches are on Facebook. In Italy: 7%.
The first measured, country-by-country map of how European churches show up online. Built from 12,625 churches across 18 countries. We did not ask. We measured.
12,625
churches measured
18
countries
0
surveys sent
Key findings
- The UK leads European church social adoption. 84% of British churches have a verifiable Facebook presence; 71% have an active YouTube channel — both far ahead of any other primary market.
- Italy looks last on paper, but it is not absent online. Just 7% of Italian churches have an own Facebook page — because Italian Pentecostalism is federated, and most local congregations share their denomination's digital presence rather than maintaining their own.
- The Nordics and Low Countries punch above their weight. The Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, and Belgium all show 70-90% coverage on websites and social channels despite small church bases — small markets, mature digital habits.
- Every existing report on this surveys leaders. We did not. We measured what 12,625 individual church URLs, Facebook pages, and YouTube channels actually show — a methodology no European church-tech report has used at this scale before.
Methodology
We did not survey. We measured.
Every existing report on church technology surveys leaders. Pastors self-report adoption. Survey responses for technology are notoriously generous — leaders over-report best practices and under-report legacy infrastructure. We took a different path: we measured what each church's public presence shows. CMS detection ran against live websites. Facebook and YouTube presence came from page-level signals, not surveys. If a church does not show a livestream URL, we counted zero.
Coverage percentages reflect what is publicly verifiable. A church with no detected website may still have one we missed; a church without a detected Facebook page may run one under a denomination-shared account. Where we could not verify, we counted zero. The result is a conservative floor — and the first country-by-country comparison built this way.
Leaderboard
UK leads. Italy is last. Everyone else, ranked.
Composite score is the average of website, CMS detection, Facebook, YouTube, and livestream coverage rates. Score is 0–100. Ranked by composite.
United Kingdom
73
score
Website
95%
CMS
95%
84%
YouTube
71%
Livestream
19%
Based on 1,567 approved churches.
Switzerland
62
score
Website
99%
CMS
99%
41%
YouTube
50%
Livestream
23%
Based on 310 approved churches.
Germany
54
score
Website
87%
CMS
87%
33%
YouTube
40%
Livestream
21%
Based on 2,513 approved churches.
Sweden
51
score
Website
86%
CMS
82%
50%
YouTube
26%
Livestream
9%
Based on 1,034 approved churches.
Norway
38
score
Website
65%
CMS
65%
43%
YouTube
16%
Livestream
1%
Based on 406 approved churches.
France
37
score
Website
66%
CMS
64%
26%
YouTube
23%
Livestream
7%
Based on 2,611 approved churches.
Spain
22
score
Website
33%
CMS
33%
18%
YouTube
20%
Livestream
8%
Based on 2,764 approved churches.
Italy
7
score
Website
11%
CMS
10%
7%
YouTube
6%
Livestream
2%
Based on 1,002 approved churches.
By the numbers
Six things that surprised us
44%
WordPress runs the European church web
Of 7,784 European church websites where we could detect a primary platform, 3,419 are running WordPress. No challenger comes close.
27%
The UK leads on ‘modern DIY’ web stacks
27% of detected UK church sites run on Squarespace, Wix, or Webflow — the highest rate in Europe. By contrast, most other primary markets sit at 7-15%. UK churches are clearly the early movers on no-code DIY tools.
11
Church-tech platforms have not crossed the Atlantic
Subsplash, Faithlife, Tithe.ly, Pushpay, and PlanningCenter — the household names of US church tech — are running on just 11 European church websites combined. In a market of 7,784 detected sites, that is a rounding error.
15.7%
The Netherlands tops Europe on church Spotify presence
15.7% of mapped Dutch churches have a verifiable Spotify presence — ahead of the UK at 19.7% and Sweden at 3.4%. 11 of 70 Dutch churches we measured were active on Spotify.
77pp
The UK–Italy Facebook gap is a chasm
UK churches: 84% on Facebook. Italian churches: 7%. The 77 percentage-point gap is the largest single-platform gap between any two primary markets in the index.
64
A few European churches went modern frontend
64 European church sites are running modern JS frameworks — Next.js, Nuxt, Gatsby, or Framer. Vanishingly small as a share, but striking that any churches at all are shipping React/Vue-based stacks.
Stack by country
Where the modern DIY tools have landed
Share of detected church websites running Squarespace, Wix, or Webflow — versus the WordPress baseline. A rough proxy for how recently each country's churches refreshed their tooling.
| Country | Detected sites | WordPress | Modern DIY |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 1,496 | 33% | 27% |
| Norway | 262 | 29% | 20% |
| Switzerland | 307 | 55% | 11% |
| France | 1,674 | 43% | 9% |
| Italy | 98 | 62% | 8% |
| Sweden | 850 | 50% | 8% |
| Germany | 2,190 | 48% | 7% |
| Spain | 907 | 47% | 6% |
Platform mix
WordPress vs the rest
Most-detected primary platforms across the eight primary-market countries. A reasonable proxy for “modern” tooling adoption.
WordPress
3,419
Unknown
2,989
Wix
535
Squarespace
340
Joomla
261
Drupal
104
Webflow
57
Next.js
41
Case study — Italy
Italy's missing 90%: a federation, not a desert
Italy ranks last on individual church digital presence: roughly 11% have an own website, 7% an own Facebook page. That is not because Italian churches are absent online. It is because Italian Pentecostalism is structured federally: most local Assemblee di Dio congregations share the national umbrella organisation's website, Facebook page, and YouTube channel. The local church is present digitally — through its denomination, not its own URL.
We tested this directly. After running Google Places lookup + LLM extraction against all 918 unenriched Italian churches in our catalog, the country-level numbers did not move. Italian local congregations genuinely do not maintain their own websites, Facebook pages, or YouTube channels at any measurable rate. The digital presence lives at the federation layer, not the local one — and that is the structure, not a data gap.
This pattern is invisible in surveys. A pastor asked “does your church have a website?” says no. Asked “is your church online?” says yes. The honest answer requires observed data — and reframes the question from “is Italy behind?” to “does Italian Christianity organise its digital presence at a different layer of the denomination?” The data says it does.
Smaller markets
Small countries punching above their weight
Smaller European church markets where our sample is too modest for direct ranking against the primary tier, but where coverage rates are striking.
| Country | Churches | Website | YouTube | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | 70 | 94% | 84% | 77% | 77 |
| Austria | 25 | 100% | 80% | 68% | 75 |
| Czech Republic | 21 | 95% | 86% | 71% | 75 |
| Poland | 39 | 95% | 82% | 64% | 74 |
| Finland | 54 | 96% | 67% | 57% | 65 |
| Belgium | 34 | 85% | 74% | 59% | 65 |
| Denmark | 79 | 99% | 82% | 37% | 64 |
| Ireland | 34 | 94% | 59% | 53% | 62 |
| Greece | 25 | 84% | 72% | 52% | 59 |
| Hungary | 21 | 81% | 48% | 48% | 55 |
For press & researchers
Cite, download, ask
The underlying dataset is open under CC BY 4.0 and has a citable DOI. Country-level aggregates are released openly; per-church platform detections stay internal. Raw JSON of everything on this page is available at /api/european-church-tech-2026.json.
Get the data
Citation
European Church Tech 2026: an observed-data dataset on digital adoption across 12,625 European churches. GospelChannel, 2026. doi:10.5281/zenodo.19882722.
@dataset{gospelchannel_ect2026,
title = {European Church Tech 2026: an observed-data dataset on digital adoption across 12,625 European churches},
author = {GospelChannel},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Zenodo},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.19882722},
url = {https://gospelchannel.com/european-church-tech-2026},
note = {CC-BY-4.0}
}For methodology questions, sample-size queries, or per-country deep dives, write to press at gospelchannel dot com.
Generated 7 August 2026 · Data version 2026-04-28-r5 · Coverage updates as enrichment runs land.
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