What a masjid website actually needs

Four things bring almost everyone to a masjid website: today’s prayer times, when Jumuah starts and what language the khutbah is in, how to donate, and what is happening this weekend for the kids. If those four answers are not visible on a phone without scrolling, tapping a menu, or pinching to zoom, nothing else on the site matters.

We built the sites for Masjid As-Sunnah in St. Paul and the Dar Al Qalam Center in Minneapolis, and the traffic pattern is the same at both. It is not spread evenly through the week. It climbs Thursday night into Friday morning, it jumps hard the week Ramadan begins, and it spikes without any warning on the afternoon someone in the community passes away. A masjid website is a utility with three seasons, and most of them are built as brochures.

What do people actually come to a masjid website for?

Here is who shows up and what they need. Notice how little of it is the history of the organization.

Who is visiting	What they came for	Where it belongs
A regular attendee on a phone	Today’s iqamah times, not the calculated adhan times	Top of the home page, above the fold
Someone driving in from another suburb	Jumuah start, khutbah language, parking, sisters’ entrance	A dedicated Jumuah page linked in the header
A donor mid-Ramadan	A donate button that finishes in under a minute	Header, footer, and every page
A parent	Weekend school schedule, fees, registration	One click from home
A family after a death	Time and place of salatul janazah, today	A banner across the home page
A visitor who is not Muslim	Whether they can come in, what to wear, where to park	A short visiting page

The single most common build mistake is publishing calculated prayer times without iqamah times. People do not come at the beginning of the time window. They come for the jamaah. A masjid website that shows adhan times only is showing the number nobody drives across town for.

Why does a hand-typed prayer time table always go stale?

Because it is 1,825 edits a year. Five prayers, 365 days, and the times drift by roughly a minute a day at Minnesota latitudes. No volunteer sustains that, and none should be asked to.

There are three other failure points people forget. Daylight saving shifts everything by an hour twice a year, and a hard-coded table silently becomes an hour wrong in March. Iqamah policy changes seasonally, so the fixed 8:30 Isha that worked in December is nonsense in June. And the volunteer who was keeping it current eventually moves, graduates, or gets a job with worse hours.

Approach	Cost	How accurate it stays	Who has to touch it
Typed into the CMS by hand	Free	Wrong within two or three weeks	Someone, every single week
A monthly PDF uploaded to the site	Free	Fine, if anyone remembers to upload it	Someone every month, and it is unreadable on a phone and invisible to Google
Calculated in the page from a library, with iqamah offsets	Part of the build	Exact daily; iqamah reviewed a few times a year	Almost nobody
Read from the platform that runs your lobby screen	$0 to $30 a month	Always matches the wall	The office, in one place
A Google Sheet the office edits, read by the site	Part of the build	Good	The office, only when policy changes

The rule that matters more than which option you pick: the website and the screen on the wall must read from the same source. When a member sees 6:45 on the wall and 6:30 on their phone, they stop trusting both, and you have made your own announcement channel useless.

Two technical notes worth insisting on. Put the times in real HTML text rather than an image or an embed-only widget, so Google and AI assistants can actually read them when somebody searches for prayer times near them. And keep the page light, because that home page gets hit hardest on mobile data in a parking lot. We wrote more about that in why your website is slow.

Which calculation method should the site use?

Whichever one your imam already uses. This is a religious decision, and a developer who picks it silently has overstepped.

Sunrise, Dhuhr, Asr, and Maghrib are geometric, though Asr depends on convention: the Hanafi position uses a shadow twice the object’s length, while the majority position uses once. Fajr and Isha depend on a chosen twilight angle, and the common conventions differ meaningfully:

Convention	Fajr	Isha
ISNA	15 degrees	15 degrees
Muslim World League	18 degrees	17 degrees
Umm al-Qura, Makkah	18.5 degrees	90 minutes after Maghrib, 120 in Ramadan
University of Islamic Sciences, Karachi	18 degrees	18 degrees
Egyptian General Authority of Survey	19.5 degrees	17.5 degrees

At Twin Cities latitude the difference between the 15 degree and 18 degree conventions works out to roughly half an hour at each end in late June. That is the difference between a Fajr jamaah people can reach and one they cannot. Get the method, the Asr convention, and the high latitude rule in writing from your imam before a line of code is written, and put that note in the site documentation so the next developer does not quietly change it.

How should the donate page handle zakat and sadaqah?

Let people designate. At minimum: zakat, general sadaqah, building fund, and during Ramadan, iftar sponsorship and zakat al-fitr. Zakat has restricted categories of eligible recipients and most boards hold it in a separate account with separate reporting. A single unlabeled Donate field creates a bookkeeping problem in the last ten nights that the treasurer will be untangling in June.

Then make recurring giving the default option rather than a checkbox nobody sees. Thirty families at $25 a month is $9,000 a year you can actually budget against, and it does not depend on anyone remembering.

Mobile checkout is where most masjid donation pages lose money. Baymard Institute’s long-running checkout research consistently finds forced account creation and long forms among the top reasons people abandon a payment they intended to make. Apply that directly: no account required, Apple Pay and Google Pay enabled, four suggested amounts plus an open field, and no more than name, email, amount, and card.

Payment method	Typical all-in cost	When to use it
Card, standard Stripe or PayPal rate	About 2.9% + $0.30	The default for one-time gifts
Card, verified nonprofit rate	Around 2.2% + $0.30	Apply for it; both providers offer discounted nonprofit pricing
ACH bank debit	Well under 1%, often capped per transaction	Large gifts and monthly giving
Platform fee stacked on processing	0% to about 2%	Varies by platform; some run a donor-tip model with no platform fee

On $150,000 of online giving, a single point of difference is $1,500 a year. That is more than most masjids spend on the website itself over the same period. Ask your processor one more question that is specific to this context: whether fees are deducted from the designated amount, since boards take different positions on whether processing costs may come out of zakat.

What does the site have to do in Ramadan?

Ramadan is when a masjid website earns its whole budget, and it is also when it most often breaks. Build a Ramadan mode a volunteer can switch on from the admin screen, not a set of pages someone rebuilds from scratch every year.

What should appear when it is on: today’s iftar time, which is Maghrib, and the end of suhoor, which is Fajr. Taraweeh start time and how many rakah, because visitors will ask. Qiyam schedule for the last ten nights. Community iftar dates and how to sponsor one. I’tikaf registration if you offer it. The zakat al-fitr amount your board has set for the year and the deadline, which is before Eid salah. And Eid prayer times and location, which for larger congregations often means a rented hall rather than the masjid itself, with a map link.

One thing to avoid: hard-coding the first day of Ramadan or the date of Eid months ahead. The start depends on which body your masjid follows for moon sighting, and a website that confidently announces the wrong date does real damage to trust. Show the expected date with a clear label, then update it when the announcement is made.

How fast do announcements and janazah notices have to go up?

Within the hour, from a phone, by whoever happens to be holding the phone. Janazah notices are genuinely time-sensitive because burial normally happens quickly, and a notice that goes up the next morning has failed.

Design for that. Three fields, a phone-friendly form, and the notice appears as a banner on the home page and as an entry on a dated notices page. Give it an expiry date so it removes itself, because nobody will remember to take it down. Wire it to whatever channel your community already uses, whether that is email, SMS, or a WhatsApp group, so the volunteer posts once rather than four times. And set the default to withhold the family’s phone number unless they have explicitly asked for it to be listed.

How do we handle Somali, Arabic, and Oromo?

Translate the six pages that matter, not all forty. Prayer times, Jumuah, donate, weekend school, contact, and the visiting page cover almost every real need. Trying to maintain a fully mirrored forty-page site in three languages is how organizations end up with stale translations that say the wrong Jumuah time.

Arabic needs actual right-to-left support: the direction attribute set on the page, layout that mirrors rather than just reflows, logical CSS spacing so margins flip correctly, and a real Arabic webfont, because system fallbacks render Arabic poorly on Windows. Somali and Oromo both use Latin script, so they are typographically straightforward and mostly a content problem.

Do not solve this with an automatic translation widget. Machine translation mangles religious vocabulary in ways that range from confusing to embarrassing. Google Translate has rendered Maghrib as Morocco, which is a perfectly correct translation of the Arabic word and completely wrong on a prayer times page. Have a community member translate the pages, and give each language its own URL so search engines can index it, rather than a script that swaps text after the page loads.

What about weekend school and youth programs?

For most masjids this is the second-highest traffic destination after prayer times, and it is usually the worst page on the site. Parents want four things: the schedule, the fee, the registration form, and a human to email. A PDF flyer from two years ago is not a program page.

If your weekend school has grown into something closer to a full academy with enrollment cycles and tuition, it probably needs its own site rather than a section. We cover that separately under Islamic school website design, and Iqra School is an example of where that line falls.

Who is going to maintain this after launch?

Name one person and one backup before the site launches, not after. Give them a limited editor account rather than admin, twenty minutes of live training, and a one-page written runbook covering the four things they will actually do: post an announcement, change an iqamah time, add an event, and switch Ramadan mode on and off.

Then handle the ownership problem that hits every masjid eventually. Board members rotate. Register the domain and the hosting under the organization’s name, tied to an organizational email address on your own domain rather than a volunteer’s personal Gmail. We wrote a whole checklist on this in do you actually own your website, and it is worth an hour of a board meeting.

Ongoing care runs $75 to $600 a month if you outsource it, covering updates, backups, security, and small content changes. Plenty of masjids handle it internally and that is fine, as long as the person doing it is named and knows they are doing it.

What does a masjid website cost, and when should you not build one?

Expect $2,500 to $12,000 for a masjid site, which sits inside our published website pricing ranges. Roughly:

Scope	Range	What is in it
Starter	$2,500 – $4,000	5 to 7 pages, live prayer times, Jumuah page, donate link, mobile-first
Standard	$4,000 – $8,000	Adds announcements, events, weekend school registration, Ramadan mode, one extra language
Full	$8,000 – $12,000	Multilingual with right-to-left Arabic, member portal or forms, integrated donations with designations, lobby screen sync

Now the part that is against my own interest. If you are a small congregation of 50 or 60 families with no paid staff, do not spend $6,000 with us or anyone else. Claim and fill out your Google Business Profile with your address, hours, photos, and prayer times, which for local searches often does more than a website does. Set up a free prayer time platform such as Mawaqit that gives you both a public page and a lobby display. Add an entry-level Squarespace or Wix site with five pages, which runs in the low tens of dollars a month, if you want something of your own. That is a few hundred dollars a year and it covers the four things at the top of this article. Come back and hire someone when you have staff, a school with enrollment, a building campaign, or online giving large enough that a point of processing fees is real money. Our Google Business Profile checklist will get you further in an afternoon than a rushed website will.

If you are past that point and the site has become infrastructure rather than a brochure, we work with masjids and Islamic organizations across Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and greater Minnesota. You can see the approach on our mosque website design page, or get in touch and tell us which of the four things is currently broken. That is usually enough to scope it honestly.