You need a simple way to make sure your message lands the moment a visitor arrives to your website.

When your ministry, parish, school, or diocese has an urgent announcement, a static line of text buried on your homepage can be easy to miss. 

You asked, and we listened! Pop-up alerts have been a top feature request for a long time, and we are thrilled to bring this capability directly into eCatholic Websites. Setting up an eye-catching announcement takes just minutes—right inside the tools you already use every day.

Built directly into the platform you know

We built the Pop-up Alert tool using the exact same building blocks as your website's Headline Section, so there is virtually zero learning curve. If you know how to build a Headline Section, you already know how to build a pop-up alert!

Because it is built directly into eCatholic Websites, your pop-up automatically inherits your site's current theme (including any custom website theme), matching your fonts and colors straight out of the box. If you update your site's theme down the road, your pop-up updates right along with it.

Rather than spending time manually configuring layouts, you can quickly add a title, caption, optional image, and up to two call-to-action buttons. Any admin user can set one up in minutes—check out our step-by-step guide on How to Create a Pop-Up Alert to get started today.

Ideas for Every Ministry

Pop-up alerts give you control over timing and display settings, allowing you to set how quickly the pop-up appears and how often returning visitors see it. On mobile devices, layouts adapt seamlessly so visitors can easily dismiss the pop-up with a tap.

Not sure how to make the most of pop-ups? Here are a few ways organizations across the Church can put them to work:

• Catholic Parishes: Announce Mass cancellations due to weather, capital campaign updates, or holy day schedule changes.
• Catholic Schools: Highlight upcoming open houses, weather-related closures, or enrollment deadlines.
• Catholic Dioceses: Share messages from the Bishop, annual appeal updates, or major event registrations like retreats or trainings.
• Catholic Ministries: Promote active sales or discounts, volunteer sign-ups, or new resource launches.

Set It Up With Confidence

Everything you build stays saved as a draft until you are ready to publish. Want to test how it looks first? The built-in preview tool lets you see exact desktop and mobile renderings before going live.

Important Note for Parishes Using the MassTime™ Button:

If you are a parish using eCatholic's MassTime™ Button, turning a pop-up on will temporarily take precedence over the Sunday Alert feature. This is intentional—a pop-up you turn on is treated as your highest-priority message. Once you turn the pop-up off, your automated MassTime™ alert will resume to business as usual.

Driven by Your Feedback

This feature was born directly from the ideas and feedback of the people we serve. Pop-ups currently display on your homepage—where the majority of your traffic lands—and we are excited to see how you use it!

Every release, big or small, comes from the same core question: what will help you communicate more clearly and connect more deeply?

If you are an eCatholic Websites user, your new pop-up tool is waiting in the Admin Center right now. If you are exploring eCatholic for the first time, this is just a glimpse of what it means to build on a platform designed specifically for Catholic communications.