Families you served spending hours on Legacy.com or a similar platform while your funeral home's name disappears from the experience they are sharing with hundreds of friends and relatives?
A third-party platform monetising the obituary your staff created with competitor advertising targeted at the grieving family you are supposed to be serving?
No way to contact families six months after the service because the memorial relationship has moved to a platform you don't control?
Livestreaming handled through a separate tool with no connection to the memorial page, giving remote family members a disjointed experience?
Memorial and Obituary Website Platform Development
Third-party obituary platforms publish your families' tributes under someone else's brand, show competitor funeral home advertising on the same page, and keep the family relationship and data for themselves. The funeral home that arranged the service becomes a footnote.
We build branded memorial website platforms for funeral homes and funeral groups. Obituary publishing, photo galleries, condolence messages, candle lighting, donation links, and funeral livestreaming -- all hosted under your domain, all under your brand, all keeping the family relationship where it belongs.
Obituary publishing under your funeral home's domain
Photo gallery, video tributes, and memorial slideshow
Condolence wall with family moderation
Donation links, livestream integration, and social sharing
A funeral home memorial website platform lets families create branded tribute pages -- obituaries, photo galleries, condolence messages, candle lighting, charitable donation links, and livestreaming -- hosted under the funeral home's own domain rather than a third-party aggregator like Legacy.com or Forevermissed. This keeps the family relationship and data with the funeral home, removes competitor advertising from the grieving family's experience, and gives the funeral home a branded digital presence that third-party platforms cannot replicate. RaftLabs builds custom memorial platforms for single-location funeral homes and multi-location funeral groups.
100+Products shipped
·24+Industries served
·FixedCost delivery
·10-14Week delivery cycles
The obituary platform that serves your family is working against your business
When a funeral home directs a family to Legacy.com, Tribute Archive, or a similar aggregator, the family spends time on a platform that runs competitor advertising, collects the family's contact data, and builds its own audience relationship at the funeral home's expense. The funeral home that prepared the body, coordinated the service, and supported the family through one of the hardest experiences of their lives is reduced to a small attribution line at the bottom of a page that is, in every meaningful sense, owned by someone else.
The business consequence is straightforward. The funeral home loses the ongoing family relationship. It cannot reach that family for pre-need conversations, grief support programs, or anniversary remembrance outreach. The memorial page -- which may remain online for years and be visited by hundreds of people who were connected to the deceased -- belongs to the aggregator, not to the funeral home that earned it.
A branded memorial platform under the funeral home's own domain changes this. The family experience is consistent with the funeral home's brand from the arrangement conference through the tribute page. The memorial page drives traffic to the funeral home's domain. The family data stays with the funeral home. The condolence message authors -- the friends and colleagues of the deceased, many of whom will need funeral services themselves -- are visitors to the funeral home's digital property, not a competitor's.
What we build
Obituary publishing and management
Structured obituary creation from the arrangement record -- the deceased's name, dates, biography, surviving family members, and service details are pulled from your case management data so staff are not re-entering information that already exists in the system. An editorial review workflow lets staff or a family member review and approve the obituary before it is published. The published obituary lives at a URL on the funeral home's own domain -- for example, tributepage.yourfuneralhome.com/john-smith-2026 -- not on a third-party platform. The funeral home's branding, logo, and contact information appear throughout. Obituary updates can be made after publication when service details change, and the page reflects the update immediately without requiring a new submission.
Photo gallery and tribute media
A family-facing photo upload portal lets invited family members contribute photos and short video tributes directly to the memorial page without creating an account on an external service. Uploaded photos are displayed in a gallery that visitors can browse, and a curated selection is used to generate an automatic slideshow set to music chosen by the family. The funeral home's staff can review and approve uploaded media before it appears publicly, giving the family confidence that nothing inappropriate reaches the tribute page. Video tributes from family members who cannot attend in person can be uploaded and displayed alongside photos. All media is stored on infrastructure owned by the funeral home group, not on a third-party platform that may change its terms or pricing.
Condolence messages and candle lighting
A public condolence wall lets friends and colleagues leave written messages for the family. Candle lighting is a widely expected feature on memorial pages -- visitors can light a digital candle that remains visible on the tribute page alongside their name and an optional brief message. The family has a moderation dashboard where they can review condolence messages before they are published, remove inappropriate submissions, and reply to specific messages. The funeral home can configure whether moderation is on or off by default, and whether the family or a designated staff member holds the moderation role. Condolence messages and candles are timestamped and stored permanently as part of the tribute record.
Charitable donation integration
The family can designate one or more charities to receive memorial donations in lieu of or alongside flowers. The tribute page displays the selected charity or charities with a direct donation link. Donation processing is handled through an integrated payment flow -- visitors donate without leaving the memorial page, and the donation is directed to the designated charity. The funeral home receives a summary report of total donations made through the tribute page, which can be shared with the family as a record. Families who wish to establish a dedicated memorial fund rather than donate to an existing charity can create a named fund, with the funeral home acting as the co-ordinating party. Donation reporting is retained in the funeral home's system for as long as the tribute page is active.
Funeral livestreaming integration
Live video of the funeral or memorial service is embedded directly on the tribute page so remote family members watch in the same place they have been reading the obituary and leaving condolences. Access to the livestream is controlled by a private link distributed to invited guests only -- the public tribute page does not expose the livestream to uninvited visitors unless the family chooses to make it open. The recording is stored and made available for replay after the service ends, at a URL on the funeral home's domain. Remote family members in different time zones can watch the recording at a time that suits them. Livestream setup is handled through a supported integration with your existing video provider, or through a purpose-built streaming component if the group does not already have a preferred solution.
Social sharing and notifications
When the tribute page is published, the system sends automated notifications to the email addresses supplied by the family -- friends, colleagues, and extended family who should be informed. Notifications include a direct link to the tribute page on the funeral home's domain, not to a third-party platform. Each tribute page includes social sharing links for Facebook, WhatsApp, and email, formatted so that the shared preview shows the funeral home's branding and the deceased's name and photo rather than a generic platform thumbnail. Share counts are visible to the funeral home's staff and provide a signal of how widely the tribute page has reached into the deceased's social network -- useful context for understanding the marketing reach of a branded memorial platform.
Frequently asked questions
Third-party obituary platforms solve an immediate problem -- getting an obituary online quickly -- but they do it at a structural cost. The memorial page lives on the platform's domain, which means every visitor to that page is building the platform's audience, not the funeral home's. The platform shows advertising, which may include competitor funeral home ads. The family contact data -- the email addresses of the people who signed the condolence book, the friends who shared the page -- belongs to the platform. A branded memorial platform under the funeral home's own domain means the traffic goes to the funeral home, the data stays with the funeral home, and the family relationship continues with the funeral home rather than being captured by a third party. For funeral groups building a digital presence across multiple locations, a branded platform compounds in value every year as the memorial archive grows on the group's own domain.
The cleanest approach is a direct integration with your case management or arrangement software. The information already recorded in the arrangement -- full name, dates, service details, surviving family -- is pulled into the obituary template automatically, so staff are confirming and editing rather than re-entering. A family input portal lets the next-of-kin add biographical narrative, photo suggestions, and preferences for the tribute page. The funeral home staff reviews the combined content through an editorial workflow before the page is published. For funeral homes that do not have case management software with a suitable API, we build a structured intake form that staff complete once, with the same data populating the obituary and the memorial page simultaneously.
The livestream is delivered through an embedded video player on the tribute page. Access is controlled by a private link -- the family provides the funeral home with email addresses for invited remote guests, and each guest receives a unique access link. The link can be set to expire after the service ends or to remain valid for replay access. The stream itself runs through a supported video streaming provider -- we can integrate with the platform your funeral home already uses, or build around a provider suited to the volume and budget of your operation. The recording is stored at a URL on the funeral home's domain, not on YouTube or another public platform unless the family explicitly requests it. Guests who missed the live event receive a replay notification by email when the recording is ready.
A memorial website platform covering obituary publishing, photo gallery, condolence messages, candle lighting, donation integration, and social sharing typically takes 10 to 14 weeks from requirements sign-off to go-live at a fixed project cost. Adding funeral livestreaming integration adds scope depending on the streaming provider and access control requirements. Multi-location funeral groups with shared branding but per-location customisation add time depending on location count and the degree of per-location configuration required. We scope projects at a fixed cost so there are no billing surprises -- contact us with your current situation, location count, and the capabilities you want to build, and we will give you a project estimate.
Tell us your current obituary setup, how many locations you operate, and what you want families to experience. We will scope a platform built around your brand.
