It is 9 p.m. after a visitation. The director has typed the family's details into the case file, the death certificate worksheet and the obituary. Now the home's Facebook page needs a post, so the obituary gets typed a fourth time, into a small box on a phone. A date goes in wrong. By morning the post has been shared dozens of times, mistake and all, and the memorial page on your website, the one with the tribute wall, has had a handful of visits.
There is a quicker way, and it works better for the family. Post the link to the obituary page on your site, with a few lines of your own above it. What follows is how to post an obituary on Facebook so that friends and neighbors end up on your site, where the service times are right and the memories stay with the obituary.
Why the obituary page is your busiest page
Obituaries are what most people come to a funeral home's website to read. Tribute Technology, which runs websites for a large share of funeral homes, reported more than 550 million obituary visits across those sites in the first six months of 2025. Most of those visitors are not planning a funeral. They are friends, coworkers, old classmates and neighbors who want the service time and a way to say something kind.
Each of them is also a person in your town who now knows your home's name. Some will plan a funeral one day, for a parent or for themselves. The obituary page is where they meet you, so it pays to send them there instead of keeping the whole conversation on Facebook.
Share the link, not a retyped copy
A retyped obituary on Facebook is a second copy that someone now has to keep right. Say the visitation moves from Thursday to Friday. You fix the website and forget the post, and half the town drives over on the wrong night. A link always opens the current page. Fix the page once and every share shows the change.
The link also brings people to the tribute wall. Memories left under a Facebook post scroll out of sight within a week, and the family has no simple way to keep them. Memories left on the obituary page stay beside the obituary, where the family can come back and read them in a month, or in ten years.
And a link spares the director that fourth round of typing. The obituary is written once, approved by the family once and published once. The Facebook post is three or four lines and a link.
What Facebook shows when you paste a link
Post from your home's Facebook page, not from a staff member's personal profile. The post then belongs to the home, it stays when that person moves on, and families know where to look for it.
Paste the obituary page's address into a new post and Facebook builds a preview card from the page itself: usually the photo, the person's name and a line from the obituary. Wait for the card to appear before you post, and check that it shows the right person.
If the card shows your logo, a blank square or an old picture, the page isn't telling Facebook which photo to use. That is a setting on the website, and it is worth fixing once for every obituary rather than working around it post by post. If you changed the photo after the first share, Facebook's Sharing Debugger tool can refresh the card it saved.
What to write above the link
Keep it short, because the obituary says the rest. Three or four lines will do: the person's full name, with a nickname if the family uses one; their age and town; the visitation and service times, with the place; and one line asking people to read the obituary and leave a memory.
For example: "With sadness we share the passing of Walter "Walt" Dunmore, 81, of Millbrook. Visitation is Friday from 4 to 7 p.m. at our chapel, and the service is Saturday at 10 a.m. at St. Luke's. Read Walt's obituary and add a memory for the Dunmore family here." Then the link.
Write the name the way the family wrote it in the obituary, nickname and all. Leave out the cause of death unless the family put it in the obituary themselves. Skip emojis, hashtags and stock poems. A post from a funeral home reads best in the calm voice the director uses at the door.
Ask the family first
Some families want the whole town to know. Others want a small service and no public post at all. Raise it during the arrangement conference. Note the answer with the case details: post or no post, and when.
Post only after the family has approved the obituary. A post that goes up while the family is still reading the draft can reach a cousin who hasn't yet heard from the family. If the family later asks you to take a post down, take it down that day, and tell them it's done.
When to post, and who shares it
The best moment is soon after the obituary goes live on your site, while friends are still looking for the service details. A second, shorter post the day before the service helps the people who missed the first: one line with the time and place, and the same link.
Send the family the link by text as soon as the page is live. Their own friends and relatives will share it far more widely than your page can on its own, and every one of those shares opens the obituary on your site. When the family shares a link instead of a screenshot, the guests who tap it find the service times and the tribute wall, not a picture of text.
After the service, leave the posts where they are. Over time your page becomes a quiet record of the families your home has served.
Comments and replies
Friends will comment on the post, and many comments will be memories. Thank people briefly, and point them to the tribute wall if they'd like the family to keep what they wrote: "Thank you, Diane. Walt's family would love to see this on Walt's memorial page too."
Watch for strangers posting links in the comments. Scam accounts target obituary posts with links to fake videos and pages asking for money. Hide those comments, block the account and, if the family has seen them, let them know the links weren't yours. A quick check of each post the evening it goes up, and again the next morning, catches most of them.
Make the page worth the click
A link only helps if the page it opens is a good one. When a friend taps through from Facebook on a phone, the service times should be near the top, the photo should load quickly, and the tribute wall should be one tap away. If the page hides the times under a banner, or loads in pieces, people go back to Facebook and ask in the comments instead.
The obituary page is also where a visitor sees your home at its best: the care in the writing, the photos, the way the family is spoken about. Some visitors will look around the rest of the site, so make sure it answers their next questions too, from the services you offer to what they cost. Our post on putting your price list online covers the page many of them open next.
Sharing every obituary, every time
One post is easy. Doing it well for every family, late in the evening after a long day, is where homes slip. The post goes up a day late, or with the wrong time, or not at all.
With MemorialBooked, each new obituary is shared to your Facebook page when your staff publish it, with the photo and the link, so the share always carries the page the family approved. Our team can post the day-before reminder too, along with events and seasonal posts. That leaves the director with the part only a director can do: getting the obituary right with the family. Our funeral home websites page shows how the obituary pages, the tribute wall and the sharing fit together.
Rachel Lindqvist
Rachel Lindqvist leads website builds at MemorialBooked. Rachel plans each home's move off its old provider, from the obituary archive to the price list, and writes here about the pages families open first.
