We talk a lot about the importance of a great funeral home website when it comes to reaching families and adding value to your services. And it’s not just because we create websites, but because we understand how completely essential they are for connecting with your families.

But having an easy-to-navigate, educational website is important in ANY profession, not just funerals. Why? Well, to name just a few reasons…

• 97% of U.S. consumers now use online media to shop locally for products and services. (Source)
• 80% of consumers say that they use the internet first to research new products and services, and printed Yellow Pages only second or third. (Source)
• Google has stated that 20% of searches are location-related queries. With over 3.5 billion Google searches per day, this equates to about 21 billion local searches per month. (Source)

So what does all of that mean? Your families are using the internet to find you, read about you, and make a decision on whether or not they’re interested in your services – all before they even talk to you.

But simply having a website is not enough to bring all of these internet searchers into your funeral home. It takes a lot for a website to be successful and attract today’s new families. So, how do you know if your website has what it takes to keep your families’ attention and bring them into your funeral home? First, make sure that you are steering clear from these 7 reasons most funeral websites fail.

1. It’s All About You

The primary reason families visit your website is to find answers to their questions about how you can serve them in their time of need—not to find out about your firm’s history. Your families want to know how the services you provide will help them memorialize the life of their loved one. But if they land on your homepage only to see photos of your staff and how many years you’ve been in business, you’ll only drive them away. Instead, put the focus on the families. When you provide what families need, you’re on your way to building trust as well as creating a dynamic place where people can gather to share, celebrate, learn and heal.

This website is bright, uplifting and encourages families to celebrate life. It looks totally unlike the dark and dreary funeral website that most families expect.

2. Your Website Feels Like A Typical Funeral Home Website

Many people have preconceived notions about funerals – they’re cold, they’re creepy, they’re off putting, they’re scary. It’s your job as a funeral professional to kick these misconceptions to the curb, and that starts with the way your website sounds, looks and feels. Your families should feel comforted the second they land on your home page. Use soothing colors, light-hearted photos, and inspirational messaging to help express the idea that funerals are a celebration of life, rather than a drab, dreary place of mourning. Your families will thank you for it when they are greeted by something that feels nothing like a funeral website – in a good way!

Posey Funeral Directors allow families to explore a wide range of personalized, one-of-a-kind service options through their website’s “Explore The Possibilities” tool. This helps to open families’ minds up to the many options that they can choose from.

3. You Don’t Show The Value Of Your Services

When deciding the type of service to hold, most people reflect on past experiences attending funeral services that did nothing to help with their healing. With personalization and unique memorials gaining traction, your website content needs to offer examples and ideas to help families understand how a service brings people together and aids in the healing process.

If your products and services page is just a long list of things that you sell, without any kind of explanation, you are doing yourself and your families a huge disservice. The people visiting your website want to be educated about what type of service would be best for their loved one. You should also offer examples of unique personalization ideas and successful memorial events. For example, showing pictures and sharing stories about how you put together a funeral decorated in the colors of grandpa’s favorite basketball team, since he was such a big sports fan.

Showing these personalized examples helps families truly understand the value of a service – how it brings together family and friends to celebrate the life lived, and how much it helps in the healing process.

4. You Ignore The Long-Term Grief Journey

We know that helping families is your number one priority. You want to ensure that you give them a service that is meaningful, beautiful and one that they will remember. But your job as a funeral professional does not end once the service is over. The healing that comes after the service is just as important as the healing that takes place inside your funeral home. Offering online services like grief support groups, e-grief counseling, daily affirmation emails and interactive videos on your website are great ways to extend the value of your service, and help families manage their grief right from their own home. These small touches are what turn one-time families into longtime customers, so don’t underestimate their value.

5. You’re Focusing On The Wrong Family

We know that you take great pride in your dedication to the funeral profession. After years of helping families, you want to share your firm’s rich history – but it shouldn’t be the focus of your website. Instead, you should focus on what you can do for your families. When someone visits your website, they should see themselves. For example, they should be able to visualize the personalized service they could have and should feel comforted and guided through the healing process. Use the pages on your website to convey these things, and make families comfortable before they even walk through your doors. Your ‘About Us’ page should be just one simple page among many.

This social memorial page hosted on Daniels Family Funeral Service’s website allows family to share memories and stories, send flowers and upload photos all right on their website. They can also share the page with family and friends on Facebook, which helped 145 people like and recommend this beautiful social memorial page.

6. You’re Not Hosting Memorial Pages On Your Site

Obituaries are, by far, one of the largest sources of traffic for the majority of funeral home websites. They are what bring in new visitors to your website when they are searching for a loved one’s service information, and they are something that future-families look through when they are considering whether or not they should use your funeral home. But if you are hosting your obituaries on an outside service or another website, you are losing all of this traffic. Why? Once they click away from your site, it’s hard for them to find their way back, or the confusing navigation may put them off from your funeral home all together.

Instead, you should host obituaries right on your own website, and make them as easy as possible to find. (Recent obituaries housed right on your homepage is the best option.) Want to take the value of your obits one step further? Use social memorial pages to draw even more families into your website, by allowing families to share memories, stories and photos from their memorial page on to Facebook or Twitter. Your families will love the easy social sharing options that make it easy to connect with loved ones, and it will make it simple for more families to find your website. To learn more about the benefits of these unique obituary sites, read 5 Creative Ways To Leverage Social Memorial Websites.

7. Your Families Can’t Find Your Website

Last but not least, what value is your funeral home website if your families cannot find it? The term “funeral home” is searched on average over 40,000 times a month, so you have a lot of people who are looking for local services – and a lot of competitors who are popping up alongside of you on search engines. Therefore, make sure that your website is scientifically engineered to to rank well within the search results so that your funeral home is the first that families discover when they are looking for help. You can do this by making sure that your current website is search engine optimized (read more about this in our post “Why SEO Is Critical To Your Funeral Home Website”).

funeralOne’s f1Connect funeral website platform is engineered to rank well on search engines, it avoids all of the common website missteps that we mention above. We made sure to create the funeral website that we know your families are searching for, so that you can clearly educate them on the value of a funeral service.

To learn more about f1Connect, click here. You can also reach out to us at (800) 798-2575 ext. 5!


To learn more about f1Connect, click here. You can also reach out to us at (800) 798-2575 ext. 5!

Rilee Chastain

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