The Link I Told a Funeral Director to Leave Off

Last week I spent an afternoon putting a Facebook link on a funeral home website.

One link up in the header, beside the phone number. A second at the bottom of every page. And next to the first one, in small grey type, the date of the last thing her office posted over there.

Then I drove home.

I built that website in 2021. The link wasn’t already on it because of me.

Funeral homes link a social profile on 40.8% of their websites, which is less often than any other trade I audit.

What I said in her office

She’s a funeral director, second generation, and the whole business was her mother’s before it was hers. We were sitting in the arrangement room going through the design, and she asked me about social icons.

I told her they’d look cheap.

That was the word I used. A little blue circle sitting under a photograph of the chapel, beside a sentence about her family serving that county for sixty years, looking like an advertisement for something. Undignified, I said.

She agreed with me immediately, which is the part I think about now. She agreed because I was the expert in the room and she’d hired me to have opinions exactly like that one.

So we left them off. The website we built was quiet and tasteful and gave a stranger nothing whatsoever to check.

What I found out two years later

She showed me her Facebook page on her phone while I was there for something else entirely.

Every service they’d handled. Families writing thank you notes underneath the photographs. A note from the January the roads iced over, telling everyone the visitation had moved to the afternoon, with forty people replying underneath it.

Her office manager had been running that page for years, on her lunch break, and she’d been doing it beautifully.

None of it was reachable from the website. Not one link, in either direction.

She owned the best evidence of her own work anywhere in that county, and I’d put it in a room with no door on it.

What it cost, as far as I can tell

The mechanism is dumber than you’d hope.

When her office posted an obituary to Facebook, families shared the Facebook post. Not her page. The post.

So every share sent people to Facebook, where they read the obituary, left a comment and closed the app again. Her website was never anywhere in that chain, and neither was her phone number.

It ran the other way as well. A daughter who found the website first got a page of lovely photographs and no way of telling whether anyone had been inside that building since 2021.

Nobody sends you a note when they choose the other home. That kind of loss never arrives anywhere you could go and look at it.

So what would it take for a stranger to work out that your business was open on Monday? Not from your Google listing. From your own website, where you’ve spent the money.

The trade does this more than any other

I’d love to tell you my client was unusual. 40.8% of the funeral home websites I audited link out to a social profile, against 66% of small business sites.

Every other trade I audited puts that link on more often than this one does. It finishes 47 of 47, with nothing at all underneath it.

The same trade runs analytics on 84.5% of its sites, more than anybody I audit, so funeral homes count everything and still can’t be found.

The writing is thin too, and in a way that compounds the first problem.

17.8% of these sites publish a blog where 37% of small business sites do, which is nearly as poor a showing as the social column.

Put those two together and you’ve got a website that can’t prove a single thing happened this year.

The part that makes it worse

They’ve already done the difficult half, which is what gets me about this trade.

Paste a web address into a family group chat and it usually arrives wearing a photograph and the name of the business. Strip the Open Graph tags out of the page and it arrives wearing nothing at all, a bare string of characters in a thread full of people trying to establish where they’re supposed to be on Thursday.

83.7% of funeral home sites carry those tags against 75.7% of everything I audited, one of the stronger results this trade posts anywhere.

So the link looks right when it gets shared. There’s just nothing on the page encouraging anyone to share it, and nothing pointing at the place where the sharing already happens every week.

The door is beautifully hung. Nobody built the hallway.

So where can a stranger go from your homepage? Anywhere at all, other than back to Google?

Why I got it wrong

I confused dignity with silence, and they’re not the same thing.

A funeral home has to look serious, and I still believe that completely. Nothing here’s an argument for animated banners or a countdown timer under the obituaries.

But a family posting a photograph of their mother’s flowers on your page, and forty other families seeing it, isn’t undignified. It’s the most dignified thing that happens to most businesses all year.

I was applying a rule I’d picked up building websites for restaurants and gyms, where a social icon really is a marketing widget. I never once asked myself whether that rule survived in a building where people cry.

Gyms link a profile on 79.2% of their sites, and the habit behind that number got built at the front desk rather than on the website.

Did whoever built your website ask?

What I do now

The link goes on first. Before the copy, before the photographs, before anything a client and I argue about.

Then I hand my phone to whoever else is in the room and ask them to find the business from that link, while I watch their face. Who was the last person to look at your website who wasn’t you? They land where a stranger lands, and they say the thing a stranger would only think.

A profile that stopped posting years ago gets nothing from me. Silence tells her less about you than a stale page does, and less is the better outcome here.

And the date of the most recent post goes on the homepage beside the link, because a date is the one thing a website can’t fake and a stranger can read in half a second.

Keeping that date honest is upkeep nobody puts on a quote, and it belongs to a named person or to nobody.

All of that is a standing part of every funeral home website I build now, and it started life as an apology.

Tonight

Open Facebook or Instagram on your phone and search your own business name, the way a daughter would at eleven o’clock at night.

What comes up? Is it you, or is it the home two towns over with a name a bit like yours? When was the last thing posted, and would a stranger reading it believe anyone still works there?

Now open your own website and try to get from the homepage to that profile without typing anything. Time it.

I’d bet you can’t do it at all, and I’d bet the profile is better than the website. If I’m wrong on either count, send me the address and tell me so, because I’ve been wrong about this before and I’d rather hear it from you than work it out two years late.