If your church built its website on Squarespace or Wix, you probably assumed pastor@yourchurch.org came bundled in. It didn't — at least not the way you think. What you almost certainly have is email forwarding: a free redirect that bounces incoming mail from your domain to a Gmail, Yahoo, or other personal inbox. It looks like a real church email address in the "From" line of your outbox, but under the hood it isn't a hosted mailbox at all, and that gap causes two very concrete problems: your outgoing emails land in spam more often than they should, and you can't actually send FROM that address reliably — only receive. This matters more for a church than almost any other small organization. You're emailing donation receipts, event RSVPs, volunteer schedules, and pastoral correspondence — mail that needs to actually arrive, and needs to look legitimate to Gmail and Outlook spam filters. Here's exactly what Squarespace and Wix give you, why it falls short, and what real church email hosting looks like.
When you buy a domain through Squarespace or Wix (or connect one you already own), both platforms include a free feature usually called "Email Forwarding." It lets you create an address like info@yourchurch.org that automatically redirects any mail sent to it into an existing inbox — typically a personal Gmail or Yahoo account someone on staff already uses.
That's it. There's no mailbox living on Squarespace's or Wix's servers, no shared inbox multiple staff can log into, no calendar, no shared drive, and critically, no ability to actually send outgoing mail as that address through their infrastructure. When your office administrator hits reply from Gmail, the message often goes out looking like it's from their personal Gmail account, not your church domain — or it goes out "on behalf of" your domain, which spam filters treat with more suspicion than genuine hosted mail.
Both companies also sell upgrade paths — Squarespace has pointed customers toward Google Workspace as an add-on, and Wix offers a similar Google Workspace bundle — but neither makes this the default, and it's easy to build an entire church site without ever being prompted to set it up.
Forwarding and hosting solve different problems, and confusing them is the single most common email mistake we see churches make.
Forwarding only handles inbound mail — someone emails info@yourchurch.org, and it silently reroutes to another inbox. It does nothing for outbound mail sent from your church's actual domain. That means your staff is sending pastoral emails, giving statements, and event replies from a personal @gmail.com or @yahoo.com address, which looks unprofessional to recipients and, worse, is a red flag to spam filters that increasingly expect small organizations to send from their own verified domain.
Real hosting — like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 — gives you an actual mailbox on your domain that both sends and receives, is properly authenticated, syncs across phones and desktops, and lets multiple staff or volunteers share one inbox (like giving@yourchurch.org) without everyone forwarding to one person's personal account.
This is the part most churches never connect back to their website builder. When your outgoing mail doesn't originate from a properly authenticated mail server tied to your domain, Gmail and Outlook's spam filters score it lower. Donation receipts, Sunday bulletins, and volunteer sign-up confirmations start landing in spam or promotions folders — and nobody complains, because nobody sees a bounce message. They just quietly stop opening your emails, or worse, never see them at all.
We regularly run free deliverability checks for churches and find the same pattern: a website that looks great, and a domain with zero real email infrastructure behind it — no verified sending server, missing or misconfigured authentication records, and a "reply-to" address that doesn't match what recipients see in their inbox. Each of those independently increases the odds your legitimate church mail gets filtered.
Every mailbox provider checks three DNS records before deciding whether to trust mail claiming to come from your domain:
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) lists which servers are allowed to send mail on behalf of yourchurch.org. If you're forwarding through Squarespace/Wix but actually sending from Gmail, your SPF record either doesn't authorize Gmail to send as your domain, or doesn't exist at all.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) attaches a cryptographic signature proving the email wasn't altered in transit and really came from an authorized server. Email forwarding services rarely set this up correctly for outbound mail, because they're not designed to send — only redirect.
DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when SPF or DKIM checks fail — quarantine it, reject it, or let it through. Without a DMARC policy, spam filters default to treating unauthenticated church mail with more suspicion. Getting all three configured correctly is exactly what real email hosting (and a proper migration) sets up for you — it's not something a free forwarding feature will ever do.
Google Workspace is the standard we recommend for churches, and it's what we specialize in migrating churches onto. It gives every staff member and ministry a real @yourchurch.org mailbox with Gmail's spam filtering, storage, and search — plus shared Google Calendar for scheduling volunteers and services, Google Drive for sermon notes and bulletins, and the ability to set up group addresses like elders@ or volunteers@ that route to multiple people at once.
Most importantly for deliverability, Google Workspace automatically handles the SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup correctly when configured by someone who's done it before, so your mail is properly authenticated from day one instead of quietly failing spam checks.
Google offers a nonprofit-friendly discount for eligible churches and ministries, which typically brings the per-user cost down significantly compared to standard business pricing — worth checking before you assume it's out of budget.
You can find out in about two minutes without touching any code. Go to your domain's DNS settings (in Squarespace: Settings → Domains → your domain → DNS Settings; in Wix: Settings → Domains → Manage DNS Records) and look for MX records. If they point to something like "mx.squarespace-mail.com" or a Wix mail domain with no Google or Microsoft servers listed, you're on forwarding only, not hosted mail.
You can also just send a test email to your church address from an outside account and watch where it actually lands, and check what shows up in the "From" field when your staff replies. If it shows a personal Gmail or Yahoo address instead of your church domain, that confirms it.
Moving to real email hosting does not require moving your website off Squarespace or Wix, and it doesn't require changing your domain registrar. Email and website hosting are handled by separate DNS records (MX for mail, A/CNAME for the site), so you can keep your website exactly where it is and only update the mail records.
The main risk in a self-managed migration is doing it in the wrong order — turning off the old forwarding before the new mailboxes and DNS records are verified, which causes a window where mail bounces or gets lost. A proper migration checks the current setup, sets up the new mailboxes, configures SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and only then cuts over the DNS records, so there's no gap where your church stops receiving mail.
Get a free church email deliverability audit →No. Squarespace includes free email forwarding when you buy a domain through them, which redirects incoming mail to an existing personal inbox. It does not include a real hosted mailbox, shared calendar, or the ability to properly send outgoing mail as your church domain — that requires a separate service like Google Workspace.
Yes, functionally. Wix also offers free email forwarding tied to a domain purchase, plus a paid Google Workspace bundle as an add-on. Neither Wix nor Squarespace hosts your actual mailbox themselves — the real hosting always comes from Google or Microsoft.
Usually because your outgoing mail isn't properly authenticated with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records tied to your church's actual domain — common when you're sending from a personal Gmail account that only receives forwarded mail from your church address rather than sending through a real hosted mailbox on that domain.
Yes. Your website's hosting and your email's hosting are controlled by separate DNS records, so you can move your church's mail to Google Workspace while your site stays exactly where it is on Squarespace or Wix, with no downtime for either if the DNS records are updated in the right order.
Google offers a nonprofit program that many eligible churches and ministries qualify for, which reduces the standard per-user price. Eligibility and exact pricing depend on your organization's registered nonprofit status, so it's worth checking before assuming full-price cost.