It is a little after two in the morning. A woman’s father has just died at home, the hospice nurse has come and gone, and someone has to call a funeral home. She picks up her phone, searches for the one her family used years ago, and lands on a homepage with a rotating photo of a chapel, a welcome message from the founder, and a menu with nine items. The phone number is somewhere at the bottom, in small gray type. She scrolls past it twice.
Three days later, a college friend of the family is sitting in a parking lot trying to find out what time the visitation starts. He searches the father’s name, finds the obituary, and sees a service time that was changed on Tuesday but never updated online. He arrives an hour late.
Neither of these moments makes it into a review, and nobody calls to complain. But both of them shape how a community feels about a funeral home, and the first one decides whether the family calls you at all. When a website makes a grieving person work to find help, many of them simply go back to the search results and call the next name on the list, the home down the road whose phone number was right at the top of the screen.
Funeral home websites serve two very different visitors. One is a family member who needs help right now and is barely holding it together. The other is a friend, coworker, or neighbor who wants to know when and where to show up. Both are usually on a phone, both are often older, and both deserve a site that gets them to the answer in a few taps. Here is what your service and obituary paths need to make that happen.
Give Families an Unmistakable Way to Get Help Right Now
The most important thing on a funeral home website is a phone number that a person in shock can find and tap without thinking. Put it at the top of every page, make it large enough to read without glasses, and make it a tappable link on mobile so it dials immediately. Next to it, say plainly that someone answers around the clock, if that is true for your home. “Available 24 hours a day” next to a number tells a family at two in the morning that it is okay to call.
That call should reach a person. If after-hours calls go to an answering service, make sure the service knows your current on-call director and can reach them quickly, because the website has just promised the family that help is a phone call away.
Right beside that phone number, add a short, clearly labeled link such as “A death has occurred” or “We need help now.” It should lead to a single page written for that exact moment. Families in this situation are almost always asking the same few questions: who do I call first, what happens next, and what do I need to do right now?
Answer those questions in the order a family will face them, and in your own words based on how things actually work in your area. A death at home under hospice care usually unfolds differently than an unexpected death at home, and a death in a hospital or nursing facility involves staff who will coordinate with you once the family names your home. Write a short paragraph for each situation so the reader can find theirs quickly. Tell them what your staff will do when they arrive and what can wait until morning. Knowing that the paperwork, the obituary, and the service decisions can all wait a day takes real weight off a family’s shoulders.
Keep this page free of sales language and package pricing. It should feel like the calm voice on the other end of the phone, and it should end with the same phone number, repeated where they can tap it.
One more thing: this path should never run through a web form. Forms are fine for pre-planning inquiries and general questions, and we have written separately about how contact forms quietly cost businesses leads, but nobody whose mother just died should be asked to fill in fields and wait for a reply.
Write Service Pages for People Who Have Never Done This Before
Most families arranging a funeral have never done it before, or did it once many years ago. They do not know the difference between a memorial service and a funeral service, whether cremation rules out a viewing, or what “immediate burial” means. Your service pages are where they start to figure it out, often late at night and often with a sibling on speakerphone.
A clear structure helps. Most homes can organize their offerings into a few main paths: traditional funeral and burial, cremation (with or without a service), memorial and celebration-of-life services, and pre-planning. Give each one its own page, and open each page with a plain description of what that option looks like from the family’s side. What happens first, what choices they will make, who will be there, and how long it usually takes. Save the industry vocabulary for later in the page, and define it when you use it.
Write the cremation page with particular care. Many families choose cremation and still want a gathering, a viewing, or a memorial later, and they are often unsure whether that is allowed or what it involves. Spell out the options you offer so nobody assumes they have to give up a service to choose cremation.
Pre-planning deserves its own page with a different tone. The person reading it is usually calm, often older, and thinking about sparing their children the hard decisions. They want to know how the process works, whether they can pay ahead, and whether they can change their plans later. This is the one place on your site where an inquiry form makes sense, alongside a phone number for those who would rather talk.
Where prices and the General Price List fit
Families want to understand costs, and many of them will look for prices on your website before they ever call. It helps to know what the FTC actually says here. Under the FTC Funeral Rule, consumers have the right to get price information over the phone, and when they visit in person they must be given a written, itemized General Price List to keep. The FTC’s consumer guidance also notes that funeral homes are not required to mail their price lists, though many do, and some post them online.
The FTC has also been clear about how the phone and the website relate. In a 2024 business guidance post about an undercover phone sweep, the agency said providers may point callers to price information available online, but that doing so does not replace answering their questions on the phone. The same post reminds providers that a list of package prices alone does not meet the General Price List requirements. Whether online price posting should become required has been part of the FTC’s review of the Rule; the agency held a public workshop in 2023 that explored whether and how funeral providers should be required to display or distribute price information online. For where that stands today, check the FTC directly, and talk with your own advisor or state board about what applies to your home. This article is about your website, and none of it is legal advice.
From a website standpoint, the practical takeaway is simple. If you choose to post price information or your General Price List online, make sure what is posted matches the list your staff actually hands out, with the same effective date. If you show package prices on a service page, avoid presenting them as if they were your whole price list. And on every service page, make it obvious that families can call and ask about prices, and that someone will answer.
Make Every Obituary Easy to Find, Read, and Share
For many funeral homes, the obituary section is the busiest part of the site. Its visitors are the friends, coworkers, church members, and distant relatives searching a name to find out what happened and how to pay their respects. How those pages look and work shapes how the community sees you.
Start with findability. “Obituaries” should be in the main menu, visible on mobile without hunting, and the listing page should show the most recent first with a photo and full name for each. Add a simple search by name. People often know a first name and a last name and nothing else, and they may be searching weeks later to send a card.
Each obituary page should answer the practical questions before the reader has to scroll. Near the top, below the name, photo, and dates, include:
- Service date, time, and location, with the full street address
- Visitation details listed separately if the visitation is at a different time or place
- A map link that opens in the visitor’s phone navigation app
- The livestream link, if the family has chosen to offer one, with a note about when it will go live
- Flower delivery information or the family’s preferred memorial donation, with a direct link
Then let the obituary itself breathe. The family’s words deserve readable type, generous spacing, and photos that load quickly on a phone. If you offer an online guestbook, moderate it, because spam on a memorial page is painful for a family to stumble across.
Memorial donations come up often here. If the family names a charity or a church, link directly to the right giving page instead of just naming it, so friends can give in a tap. If your community includes churches that are still setting up online giving, our post on online giving for church websites covers that side of the process.
Finally, remember that obituaries get shared. A family member will post the link on Facebook or text it to a group of cousins, and the preview that appears should show the person’s name and photo clearly. A link preview that shows your logo and the words “Home” or “Obituaries” makes it harder for people to recognize what they are looking at. Share buttons for text message and email help older visitors who are not sure how to copy a link.
Build for Older Visitors, and Give Them Reasons to Trust You
Many of the people visiting a funeral home website are older adults: a surviving spouse, siblings, lifelong friends. The W3C’s guidance on older users and web accessibility describes how age-related changes affect web use, including reduced contrast sensitivity and near focus, reduced dexterity that makes small targets hard to click, and memory or concentration changes that make complicated navigation hard to follow. The same page notes that sites built to be accessible to people with disabilities also work better for older users.
For a funeral home, that translates into a handful of choices that are easy to get right. Use body text that is large enough to read comfortably on a phone, and dark text on a plain light background instead of light gray on white or text laid over photos. Make buttons and links large and spaced apart so they are easy to tap. Keep the main menu short, with labels people already understand, like “Obituaries,” “Services,” “Pre-Planning,” and “Contact.” Avoid autoplaying music or video, which is startling on a quiet phone and hard to stop.
Trust is the other half of this. Families are handing over someone they love, and they want to know who they will be talking to. Photos of your directors and staff with their names and a sentence or two about each go a long way. So do clear photos of your chapel, visitation rooms, and parking, which help a nervous visitor picture walking in. If your home has been family-owned for generations, say so, and tell that story briefly on an About page rather than across the homepage. Include your full address, your hours for the office, and your 24-hour phone number together on your contact page, so there is never any confusion about when and how to reach someone.
Each of these signals answers a question a family is asking silently: are these people kind, are they local, and will they actually pick up?
Keep Every Detail Current Without Adding to Your Director’s Day
Of all the mistakes a funeral home website can make, outdated service information hurts the most. A visitation moved because of weather, a service relocated to a larger church, a time that shifted by an hour after the family met with the pastor: any of these can leave someone standing at the wrong door. And because obituary links get shared so widely, an old time can travel a long way before anyone notices.
The fix is mostly a matter of habit. Whenever a service detail changes, the obituary page gets updated first, before the social posts and the newspaper listing. Add a short visible note such as “Updated: service time changed to 11:00 a.m.” so people who saw the earlier version notice the change. After the service, update or remove the livestream link according to the family’s wishes, so nobody clicks a dead link looking for a recording. Staff pages and holiday office hours need the same attention.
The trouble is that funeral directors are among the busiest people in any town, and website edits tend to land at the bottom of a list that never ends. Pages drift. A plugin update breaks the obituary search, the livestream embed stops loading, the site slows down on phones, and nobody finds out until a family mentions it. Each small problem pushes a few more people back to the search results, toward the home down the road.
This is the kind of work a managed website service is built to carry. With NorthMac, your website is built, hosted, updated, secured, monitored, and supported for one monthly price. When a service time changes or a new obituary needs to go up, you send the request and we handle it. When a plugin needs updating or the site needs a security patch, that happens in the background, and we keep watch so problems get caught before a family runs into them. Your team gets to spend its time with families instead of fighting with a website.
If you are ready for a site that gives grieving families a clear path to help and keeps every service detail current, see what’s included, then start your managed website for $47.
