Funeral homes
A website for people having the worst week of their lives
Almost nobody arrives at a funeral home's website calmly. Everything about how it is built should follow from that, starting with the fact that it has to load instantly and be readable on a phone at three in the morning.
What has to be easy to find, in order
- A phone number that a person answers, and an honest statement of what happens if somebody calls at night.
- What to do first when a death has just happened — at home, in hospital, in hospice, out of state. This is the page families most need and most often cannot find.
- Prices. A general price list is legally required to be given to consumers, and putting it on the website is both permitted and kind. A family should not have to ring to find out what something costs on the day they have lost someone.
- The services you offer — burial, cremation, direct cremation, memorial services, veterans' services, faith traditions you routinely serve.
- Obituaries and service times, in a form that can be shared and read on a phone.
Tone, and what to leave out
No urgency language, no marketing enthusiasm, no pop-up asking for an email address. The site should be quiet, legible and fast, and it should never do anything a grieving person has to dismiss before they can read.
This is also the strongest practical argument for the way we build. There are no cookie banners, no chat widgets and no overlays on a site we make, because there is nothing on it that needs them. A family arriving at two in the morning gets the page and nothing else.
Obituaries are the traffic, and they are the hard part
Obituaries are the most-visited pages on almost every funeral home's website, and they need to be posted quickly and shared easily. Most homes use a dedicated obituary platform for this, and the honest answer is that your site should link to it rather than badly duplicate it. If you post obituaries yourself, they are pages you add by asking, and they go up quickly.
What we build
- A clear "a death has occurred" page, findable from every other page.
- A published general price list, presented so it can be read rather than downloaded and squinted at.
- Service pages for what you actually offer, including cremation and pre-planning.
LocalBusinessstructured data with your address, phone and hours — schema.org has no funeral-specific type, so this is the one search engines actually read.- A pre-planning enquiry route that is calm and does not chase people.
- A site fast enough to load on a hospital car park's mobile signal.
What it costs
$1,500 for a new site or $1,800 to rebuild an existing one, at the launch rate for our first five clients, then $79 a month.
- New site / rebuild
- $1,500 / $1,800 — launch rate
- Monthly
- $79
- Structured data type
- LocalBusiness
- Overlays and pop-ups
- None. Nothing to dismiss before reading
- Obituaries
- Linked to your platform, or posted by asking
Tell us what your home offers and how you would like families to be treated on the page. We will build to that.
Funeral home website questions
Should our price list be on the website?
We think so, strongly. Consumers are entitled to a general price list and publishing it online is permitted. Families who are grieving should not have to ring three homes to compare, and the homes that publish are consistently the ones families describe as having treated them well.
Can obituaries be posted quickly?
Yes. If you use an obituary platform the site links to it. If you post them yourself, an obituary is a page you request in your own words and it goes up quickly — this is the case where speed of publishing matters most and we build for it.
Is a chat widget appropriate?
We would advise against it, and would want to talk it through before adding one. A person who has just lost somebody does not want a bubble appearing in the corner of the screen. A phone number that is answered is the right tool here.
Should we advertise pre-planning?
Yes, but on its own pages, reached deliberately rather than pushed at somebody who arrived because a death has just occurred. The two audiences are in completely different states of mind and the site should keep them apart.