Church Shorts Grader
Paste a channel URL or @handle. See whether the Shorts habit, the sermons, and the captions are actually in place.
Free, no signup. A public channel lookup, or a checklist in your browser. Nothing is saved to an account.
Need the words for the next Short? Write captions and hooks.
What a church Shorts score is actually measuring
A church YouTube channel can look busy and still be invisible in the short-form feed. The full sermon goes up every week, the title says Sunday Service plus a date, and nothing vertical has been posted since Easter. This grader looks at a recent slice of public uploads and turns that into a score from 0 to 100, with a plain-English note on each factor and three fixes.
The factors are the ones a media volunteer can change without a new camera: long-form sermons still being uploaded, how many of the recent uploads are Shorts, how recent the last upload is, whether anything has gone up in the last four weeks, average views, captions, and titles. Views are only a tenth of the score. A small church is not graded as if it were a network.
What counts as a sermon, and what counts as a Short
A full sermon here is an upload of at least eight minutes. A Short is 60 seconds or under, or a video up to three minutes whose title marks it as a Short. Livestream announcements, music, and testimony clips in between still count toward how often the channel posts. They are not treated as sermons, and they are not treated as Shorts.
Paste the channel URL, the @handle, or a link to one video from that channel. A church name on its own is not specific enough, because several churches share it. If the live lookup is unavailable, the checklist underneath asks for the same numbers and uses the same score.
Captions and titles are part of being ready
Most people meet a church video with the sound off. A title that only names the date does not tell them why they should stop. A caption track that lives in a menu is easy to miss on a phone. Words burned into the picture are what a sound-off viewer actually reads. YouTube's public caption flag includes automatic captions, and it does not say whether those words are burned in. The breakdown says so, instead of pretending the flag is a design review.
When you have the line you want on screen, the sermon caption and hook writer drafts opening lines, captions, and hashtags for TikTok, Reels, Shorts, or Facebook. Read them against the sermon before you post. A draft is not a transcript.
What the score cannot do
It cannot make a feed promote the channel, and it cannot see whether the preaching is any good. A high score means the public habits are in place: sermons, Shorts, a recent rhythm, readable titles, and captions. A low score means one of those is missing. The three fixes are the next things to change, weakest area first.
Cutting the vertical clip, timing the captions to the words, and reframing to the speaker is the part a checklist cannot do. That is what the rest of Sermon Clips is for. More on the format itself is in the church video platform guide and in how to get more views on church Reels.
Questions people ask
- What does the church Shorts grader measure?
- It scores a recent slice of a church YouTube channel from 0 to 100. The factors are long-form sermon uploads, how many of those uploads are Shorts, how recent the last upload is, whether the channel has posted in the last four weeks, average views, captions, and titles. Views are a small part of the score so a small church is not judged like a network.
- Do I need to sign in to YouTube?
- No. Paste the public channel URL or the @handle. The lookup reads public channel data only. If that lookup is unavailable, the same score runs from numbers you type into the checklist. Either way this page does not ask for a Sermon Clips account, and it does not ask for access to your YouTube dashboard.
- What counts as a Short versus a sermon?
- A full sermon in this score is an upload of at least eight minutes. A Short is an upload of 60 seconds or less, or a video up to three minutes whose title marks it as a Short. Announcements, music, and other videos in between still count toward how often the channel posts. They are not treated as sermons and they are not treated as Shorts.
- Why do captions and titles change the score?
- Most people meet a church video with the sound off, in a feed, with no idea what the sermon was about. A title that only says Sunday Service plus a date does not tell them why they should stop. Captions burned into the picture are what make the first seconds readable. YouTube's caption flag includes automatic captions, and the breakdown says that it cannot see whether the words are burned in.
- Will a high score get my church more views?
- No. The number describes habits you can see on the public channel: sermons, Shorts, rhythm, views, captions, and titles. It cannot make a feed promote the channel, and a church with a few hundred views can still be in good shape. The three fixes are the next things to change, starting with the weakest area.
- Is the channel URL stored?
- The page does not create an account, and the checklist runs in your browser. A successful live lookup may be remembered on the server for a few hours so the same channel is not fetched again and again. It is not attached to you. The sermon itself is never downloaded by this tool.