How to create an online memorial page
What an online memorial is, what belongs on one, how to keep it permanent, and how to link it to a headstone so people can find it at the grave.
6 min read
An online memorial is a single web page dedicated to one person — their name and dates, a photograph, a short biography, and, increasingly, a video. It is the thing an obituary points to after the newspaper archive has gone offline, and the thing a family shares with relatives who couldn't travel to the service.
What belongs on the page
- Full name, dates, and the place they were from.
- One good photograph — the one the family already agrees on.
- A short biography. Six to ten sentences reads better than two pages.
- A memorial video, if you have one. This is what people actually stay for.
- A line about the service, or where to send donations, while that is still relevant.
What does not belong: the full funeral program, a photo gallery of two hundred images, or a home address. Keep it to what a visitor can absorb in three minutes.
Choosing where to host it
The three common options behave very differently over time.
- The funeral home's obituary page — free and immediate, but usually archived or removed after a year or two, and you don't control it.
- A social media page — free, but only reachable by people with an account, and subject to whatever the platform decides next.
- A dedicated memorial page — a fixed address you control, which is the only option that survives a decade unchanged.
Permanence is the whole point
Ask one question of any service before you use it: what happens to the page in twenty years? A memorial that quietly disappears is worse than no memorial, because the family finds out at the moment they most want to look.
- The web address must be fixed and never recycled to anyone else.
- You should be able to download your own photos and video at any time.
- Someone in the family should have access besides the person who set it up.
- There should be a written commitment about what happens if the service closes.
Connecting it to the grave
An online memorial has one structural weakness: people only find it if someone sends them the link. The person who stands at a headstone in 2060 will not have that link.
A QR code solves it. A small square — engraved into the granite, or on a weatherproof plaque set into the base — encodes the page's address. A visitor points a phone at the stone, and the memorial page opens. No app, no search, no link to have been sent.
It also means the page can change while the stone stays the same. Add a video next year, fix a date, upload a better photograph — the code still points to the right place.
How to set one up here
- Choose a package. Self-publish at $249 if you already have your video; a guided package if you want us to edit it.
- Enter the name, dates, and biography, and upload the photo and video.
- Preview the page, then publish it. The address is fixed from that moment.
- Download the QR code as a high-resolution PNG or vector SVG and hand it to your monument company.
- Use the test-scan page to confirm the code reads correctly before anything is engraved.
The whole service is remote. Most families finish the page itself in under an hour.
Ready to make one for your family?
We guide the interview remotely, edit the footage, and send a print-ready QR code for the headstone. Packages start at $249.
What this looks like
Stories in the shape of the ones we help tell.
These are written examples showing how families typically use each package — not reviews from real customers. We'll publish verified testimonials here as families give us permission to share theirs.
We sat with Dad on a Sunday afternoon and asked him the questions in the guide. Three months later we scanned the plaque at the cemetery and heard him laugh again.
I uploaded everything myself over two evenings. The editing notes told me exactly what to trim, and the QR code arrived ready to hand to the engraver.
Six of us joined video calls from three states. They wove it into one film. At the service we played it, and nobody spoke for a full minute afterward.