The question underneath
For most trades the template question is about looks and money. For a funeral business it is mostly about two things a template struggles with: publishing a price list in a prescribed format and keeping it current, and building a first-days page that reads like a person wrote it for someone in shock.
If a template can do both for your practice, buy the template. Many celebrants and memorial masons are in that position. If it cannot, the gap is not cosmetic.
The template
A funeral or professional services theme with your logo, photographs and a contact form.
Cost: hundreds to low thousands.
Good at: existing, being found for your business name, holding an about page, a gallery and a contact form. Fast to launch.
Weak at: price pages with a required structure, because themes give you a generic pricing table and a PDF upload; editing prices without a developer; contact placement on every page including an out-of-hours line; type size and contrast for older readers, since most themes are designed for a much younger audience; and separate pages for the several service lines a funeral director carries.
The custom build
Built around the pages this trade needs: home, when someone dies, services and prices, planning ahead, team and premises, celebrants and ceremonies, memorials, contact.
Cost: mid four figures, fixed.
Good at: price pages built as structured records in your regulator's layout, editable by whoever answers the phone; a step-by-step first-days page; contact and out-of-hours details on every page; real photography given room; readable type and high contrast throughout; consultation booking for planning ahead; and a page for each service line that people actually search for separately.
Weak at: the invoice, and two to three weeks of build.
Where a template stops working
The price list. If your prices live in a PDF because the theme had nowhere else to put them, then every price change is a document, a re-export and a re-upload, and the version on the site is usually the old one. A price list that is a page, with each item as a field, is edited in a minute and is readable on a phone. In the UK the CMA's funerals order sets out a standardised price list and an additional options list with particular content and prominence; in the US the FTC Funeral Rule sets out the general price list, casket price list and outer burial container price list, and the telephone disclosures. Neither is a table your theme happened to ship. Treat the format as something to build to, and check the current requirements with your regulator or trade body rather than with a theme vendor.
The service lines. A funeral director does attended funerals, unattended funerals, repatriation, pre-paid plans and often memorials. A will writer does wills, mirror wills, powers of attorney, trusts and probate. Each of those is a separate search and a separate question in someone's head. One Services page answers none of them well.
The first-days page. This has to be written, not templated. What to do when someone dies at home, in hospital, in a care home. What a medical certificate is now called where you are and who issues it. Whether to call you before or after anyone else. A theme cannot give you this and a generic paste of someone else's version reads like it.
A sober way to compare
Do not do this as a return calculation. Do it as three counts over a quarter.
How many enquiries reached you through the website, and how many of those were planning-ahead appointments rather than a death. How many phone calls were people asking a question the site should have answered, such as what happens next, do you cover this area, roughly what does a simple service cost. And how many times in that quarter did a price on the site differ from the price you were actually charging.
The third count is the one that decides it. If it is anything other than zero, the site is not doing the one job it must do, and no amount of template styling fixes that.
When a template is right
- A celebrant with a single service, a fee, an about page and a contact form.
- A memorial mason whose work comes almost entirely through funeral directors, with the website as a portfolio.
- A practice about to merge or be sold.
When it is a problem
- You are a funeral director and your prices are a PDF, or you cannot say when they were last checked.
- Families ring to ask what to do first because the site does not say.
- The number is only on the contact page, or only reaches an answerphone with no explanation of what happens next.
- Older visitors tell you the site is hard to read, or you have never checked it on a phone at arm's length.
Where this sits
We build custom at a fixed price because of the price pages and the first-days page, and the full scope is on the life events websites page, with detail for funeral directors and for will writers, whose regulation differs by country. If you are a celebrant weighing this up, a template is often the honest answer, and the celebrant page says what to put on it.