Most people choose a funeral director within hours of a death. They are tired, often in shock, and usually holding a phone. Some were given a name by a hospice or a neighbour. Some search “funeral directors near me” at two in the morning because they do not know what else to do. Either way, they land on your website with one question above all the others: who do I call, and will they answer?
A funeral director website has to answer that first, and everything else calmly after it. This is what families look for, what funeral directors commonly get wrong online, and why this year’s design trends are the wrong choice for yours.
Does a funeral director need a website?
Yes. Recommendation still matters enormously in this trade, but a recommendation is now followed by a search. The family looks you up to find the number, to see the premises, and to check what a funeral will cost before they ring. If the website is thin or out of date, the recommendation loses its weight.
There is a legal reason as well. If you have a website, the Competition and Markets Authority’s funerals order requires your prices to be on it, in a set format, no more than one click from the homepage. We cover that in detail in how to publish your funeral price list online.
It is also what everything else reads. Your Google profile and review sites link to it, and AI assistants read it when somebody asks who nearby offers direct cremation. If your site does not say it, they repeat whatever somebody else wrote.
How do families choose a funeral director?
Families tend to want the same things. They need to know:
- Who answers the phone, and when. A number that is staffed day and night, written as text so it dials when tapped.
- What to do right now. Whether someone has died at home, in hospital or in a care home, what happens next and what they need to do first.
- What it will cost. A clear price for an attended funeral and for a direct cremation, and what is not included.
- What you offer. Burial, cremation, direct cremation, religious and non-religious services, repatriation, pre-paid plans.
- Where the deceased will be cared for. The premises, the chapel of rest, and who the team are.
- What other families said. Reviews, ideally on your Google profile.
- When and where the funeral is. For friends and colleagues, a funeral notice with the date, the venue and the family’s wishes about flowers or donations.
None of this is complicated. But a family under strain will not hunt for it. If an answer is not where they expect it, they ring the next name on the list.
What do funeral directors get wrong online?
These come up again and again, and most are invisible from the office, because the people who run the business already know every answer.
The phone number is hard to find
It sits in the footer, inside a logo image, or behind a contact form. A number in an image cannot be tapped on a phone or read aloud by a screen reader. The 24-hour number belongs at the top of every page, as text, visible as the page scrolls.
Prices are buried or missing
A price list linked only from the footer, or scanned so it cannot be read on a phone, helps nobody. Families want the cost before they call, and the CMA’s order requires prices one click from the homepage. A “Prices” item in the main menu answers both.
No plain guide to the first hours
Families often do not know whether to call you, the doctor or the police first, or whether anything has to happen tonight. A short, calm page on what to do when someone dies, split by where the death happened, is one of the most useful things a funeral home website can carry.
Direct cremation is treated as a lesser choice
Many families now choose a cremation with no service, and hold a gathering of their own afterwards. If your site mentions direct cremation in small print, or talks it down, those families leave. Describe it plainly, with its price and what is included, as you would anything else.
Stock photos instead of your own people and premises
Families are trusting you with someone they love. They want to see the actual building, the chapel of rest and the people who will look after them. A stock photo of lilies tells them nothing.
Funeral notices that are out of date, or only on social media
When the notices page shows funerals from last spring, people stop checking it and friends miss the date. Notices posted only on social media are hidden from anyone without an account. Keep them on your own site, where staff can update them in minutes.
The Google profile disagrees with the site
The site says the phone is answered day and night. The profile shows office hours, so the map says “Closed” at midnight. A family reads that and calls someone else. Our guide to setting up a Google Business Profile properly covers hours, categories and photos.
Why are this year’s web design trends wrong for a funeral website?
Look through this year’s design award winners and the same choices keep appearing:
- Full-screen video that plays on arrival, before anything can be read.
- Scroll-jacking and parallax, where the page moves at its own pace instead of yours, and layers slide past each other.
- Huge display headings with thin, pale body text underneath.
- Dark, moody colour schemes.
- Galleries that scroll sideways, and content that only appears when a mouse hovers over it, sometimes with a custom cursor.
- The navigation hidden behind a menu icon, even on a large desktop screen.
- Very little text, and something moving in every section.
These choices suit fashion labels, beauty brands and online shops, where the website is part of the product’s mood and the visitor has come to browse. They are wrong for a funeral director, because your visitor has not come to browse. They are often older, often reading on a phone, sometimes through tears, and sometimes at an hour when nobody else is awake. Each of those trends puts something between them and the number they came for.
The costs are specific. Thin, low-contrast text fails anyone with poor eyesight, which is why the web accessibility guidelines set a minimum contrast for body text. Motion can make people with vestibular disorders feel genuinely ill, and the same guidelines treat parallax as motion that is often non-essential. Video on arrival makes a page slow on mobile data. A hidden menu turns a simple question into a search. And a dark, dramatic palette can feel theatrical when people want steadiness.
What works instead is calm and legible: generous text, strong contrast, little or no motion (and none for visitors whose phones ask for less), a visible menu that says what each page is, and the phone number always on screen. Calm is not the same as dated. A calm site can still be beautifully made, with your own photography, careful typography and colours drawn from your premises. It simply puts the family first.
The same argument applies to care homes, whose readers are often the same families a few years earlier. We make it in what a care home website needs.
What should a funeral home website include?
- The 24-hour phone number, as text, at the top of every page and visible as the page scrolls.
- A “What to do when someone dies” page, split by where the death happened, in plain words.
- A prices page in the main menu, with the Standardised Price List and your other price information, one click from the homepage.
- A page for each type of funeral you arrange, including direct cremation, with what is included.
- Your premises and your team, photographed properly, with names.
- Funeral notices that are current and easy for your staff to update.
- Each branch with its own page, address, map and prices, if you have more than one.
- Schema markup, code that tells search engines your name, address, phone number and hours without guessing.
How should a funeral director’s website sound?
Like the best person in your office on the phone: warm without being sentimental, clear without being cold. A family reading about what to do next needs plain steps, not euphemism. Leave out the language of sales: no offers, no urgency. Write in short sentences, because people reading in grief often read a line twice. And never make a family feel that the cheaper option is the lesser one.
How do families find a funeral director locally?
Mostly through the map. For “funeral directors near me”, Google shows a handful of businesses above the ordinary results, chosen on relevance, distance and prominence. A complete Google profile, reviews and a site that says clearly where you are all feed into that. Speed matters too: a family on one bar of signal in a hospital car park will not wait for a heavy page, as we explain in why fast pages win local search. For AI assistants, read how to get recommended by ChatGPT.
Why audit your funeral director website?
Funeral websites are often built once and left. Prices change, a branch moves, the notices page goes quiet and the photos grow heavier. Nobody notices, because the people who run the business never need to use the site.
Our free website audit checks what a family and a search engine actually meet: how fast the site loads on a phone, whether the page titles say who you are and where, broken links, schema markup, and whether search engines and AI assistants can read the site at all. It takes about a minute.
Where Onlineify fits
Onlineify is a website product with published prices. We never use a template, so every site is designed for the people who will use it. The same studio that builds fashion-forward sites for clothing brands builds calm, legible ones for funeral directors, because the audience is different and the design should be too.
Every build includes a custom design, a first draft of the copy, Google Business Profile setup, schema markup, and Sanity, an editor where your staff change prices, notices and photos themselves. The pages are static files on a global network, so they open quickly on a phone. On Business and Plus, enquiry forms are routed and tracked. Anything beyond ordinary pages, such as a funeral notices system with online donations or condolence messages, is priced as a named line before you pay. There is one build fee, no Onlineify subscription, and every account is in your name. See Onlineify for local businesses, or read what a website costs first.