Wordpress for Funeral Homes and Cremation Providers

Rob Heppell: Welcome back to the Funeral X Podcast. I’m Robin Heppell and I’m joined with my Funeral Results Marketing business partner, JJ. Hey there, Jake.

JJ: Hey Rob.

Rob Heppell: Hey, that was a fun little walk down memory lane there about the beginnings of Funeral Results Marketing and where it kind of all started. A number of times we kept talking about WordPress and I think it’s a good topic to just dive into a little bit more for folks who haven’t heard of WordPress or what it is and how it can be used for funeral homes and cemeteries and cremation providers.

JJ: Yep, I agree. I learned a lot, just things that I… There are things that we discussed that I had known in connection with our relationship and the things that you do, and then I learned a lot about the other things that filled in to make Funeral Results Marketing what it is. Yes, you’re right. We talked about WordPress and I’ve got a little experience in WordPress but I’m pretty sure you’ve got a lot more. So I’d love to hear you dive into that more. I think it’s a valuable topic for people here.

Rob Heppell: Sure. Well, yes. Looking back at the last time we chatted, I had got into the funeral home websites early, like in ’96 with McCalls. And then in the early 2000s, met up with Todd Abrams from Aldor Solutions in Texas. So I started to really get into how websites were getting developed and that tenure lasted to 2006. And then I took a bit of a break from website development and I reached out to a local marketer guy, his name’s Tris Hussey. He was the one that introduced me to WordPress. I said that we had the three options, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress, and he nudged me towards WordPress, and thankfully he did. But it was more of the marketing platform compared to the other two content management systems.

At that time, I realized that, hey, this is really search engine friendly and Google friendly right out of the box. I thought that it would be a great platform for funeral homes. But at that time, it was still just a blogging platform. It didn’t look like a website. And right at that time, there was this little bit of movement of going from a blogging platform to a CMS, a content management system. And really there wasn’t anything inside the software of WordPress. It was just how it was applied basically through the themes. I was working with a developer and he introduced me to a couple of theme developers, one guy named Cory Miller from iThemes and Brian Gardner from StudioPress and Genesis.

These guys are quite well known in the theme development space. I was having conversations, direct conversations with them because I’d be kind of pushing the limits on them like, hey, can’t we make it look like a website, can’t we create a navigation bar, and working through these little things. So it was kind of neat to be working with these guys. They’ve gone on to create lots of high-performance WordPress themes, and we’ll get into themes in a little bit. And as I mentioned before, my strategy is I don’t want to have to learn it but I’d like to be able to connect the dots to funeral service. So if this is out there in the big world and other companies are using it, how does it apply to funeral service?

What we did, and this will get just a little bit technical, myself and my developers, we took just a regular blog post and a comment, those features in WordPress, and we… I thought they would look a little chintzy if we just left those on a funeral home website because they’re not going to want to hear about a post or hear about like a comment; because there were funeral home websites around at the time and they were using obituaries and condolences. So we just renamed that structure and nowadays WordPress has evolved so that there is what they call custom post types and you can now rename them and have multiple sets of these custom post types. We’ve even created our own obituary, a plugin that does that automatically. And we’ll go into that in a little bit.

JJ: Wow. No, I mean, it’s good foresight to see that. And of course, what it’s become now is something even far beyond that. But explain a little background of WordPress. I think it’d be interesting for people to hear.

Rob Heppell: Yes, sure. Well, one thing about WordPress is it’s free. The platform itself is free and it’s open-source content management system, CMS is what it’s called, and it uses PHP and it’s paired with a MySQL database. That’s how it works. So it’s not your typical back in that day of a bunch of HTML pages. As I said, it was like a blogging platform. That’s how it was used. Then it evolved into a CMS, but people also use it for, they use it for a mailing list. They can use it for a forum, media galleries. Some people use it for a membership website and even LMSs, which is a learning management system. And also, which is getting really big, is their online store. So like an e-commerce site can all be built off of that WordPress backbone.

Kind of interesting to note that it’s the most popular content management system in use. So right now, as of October of 2021, WordPress is 42% of all websites. Sorry, the top 10 million websites on the internet. And lots of people, like lots of huge companies, use WordPress. So CNN uses WordPress and the NFL uses WordPress, a number of different corporations companies use WordPress and all of our clients use WordPress, including your company website and Funeral Results Marketing too. There are these other CMSs. So just to give you the reach of WordPress, other CMSs like Wix, Squarespace, Joomla and Drupal are all under 2% each. And then the rest of the websites on the internet collectively is like 41%, which would include all the funeral technology websites, all the HTML custom websites. And so out of all that, WordPress by itself is more than all these. No one is higher than WordPress.

And again, the great thing is that it’s being updated by a number of the world’s best web developers and they just keep on making it better. So inside of our system, it will say, oh, there’s a new version of WordPress, there’s been maybe a security bug or different changes into internet protocols. And so it’s getting updated all the time. So when I started back there in 2006, I think it was like version 2.3. It was a little buggy every so often and sometimes the plugins didn’t play well with each other. It was almost like, remember like the blue screen of death, you’d get that in WordPress. So you’d have to go in, get like with your FTP protocol like FileZilla, go into the file directory and then move all of the plugins and then one by one put them back to see which plugin was the culprit of putting the site off the rails.

Now it’s staging environments and there’s testing and the repository of plugins are listed in the directory for WordPress for the plugins and it’ll show what versions they are tested to and compatible with. So it’s just a really solid system going forward. And we’re right now at 5.8 and 5.9 is coming out pretty quick and it’s just getting better and better. And again, we get to take that and see how it applies to funeral service and then pass that on.

JJ: Well, I think it’s cool. Obviously the background of it, it’s incredible. I think it’s one of those things, why didn’t I think of that? The fact is, like any other software out there if you’re plugged into that world, it’s about taking a platform that’s kind of open-source and then customizing it. Instead of building one from scratch, it’s just not necessary anymore. I think when you’re doing something like that or you’re offering websites where it’s just your platform, you’re kind of handcuffing the client quite honestly. And then at the same time if you get hit by a bus as a company or a beer truck or whatever, like where does this go? You just can’t beat the community that something like WordPress would offer. But to go on further with that, I mean, the features, what are like the particular features of WordPress that you’d say?

Rob Heppell: Sure. Yes. I just want to jump back just to give a bit more kind of background there because you made that comparison. It’s no different than the coach builders in funeral service where they take a Cadillac or a Lincoln, they then apply that car that’s mainstream to funeral service. So we’re doing the same, instead of this being like a custom car company that builds something from the ground up. So it’s very-

JJ: Well said.

Rob Heppell: The methodology is quite similar. And if anyone’s really interested, one of the main creators of WordPress is a guy named, just a soft-spoken guy named Matt Mullenweg. He’s in I believe Austin, Texas, and he’s become a billionaire with this in it. So there is a business component to this open-source platform, and they also have… So there’s wordpress.org which is what we use and that’s the one where you get the software installed on your servers. There’s wordpress.com which they host it and people just pay a small monthly fee and that’s run by a company called Automattic, and which is where the money is generated for WordPress and Matt Mullenweg. And then its sister open source company is wordpress.org. The neat thing about Mullenweg, like he’s younger than I am and he’s a jazz aficionado. So all the versions of WordPress are named after jazz musicians. I have no idea.

JJ: Oh, really? I didn’t know that.

Rob Heppell: Yes. So if you’re ever in the background and you’re looking at what version it is, it’ll be named after a certain jazz musician. Yes, it’s pretty cool. You asked about the features. Well, first of all, it’s just so easy to edit an update. It’s not hard at all. You log in, you go to the page or go to the obituary or the article and you just make your edits. You can upload images. So it’s super easy to use and it’s getting easier with some of their features.

We’ve talked a number of times about how Google-friendly and search engine friendly it is, and being an original blogging platform, that’s automatically baked into the system. So they have their page infrastructure, which would be static pages that don’t change much. So whether that’s a staff page, history page, services page, and then there’d be the posts, which are more the time-sensitive. So that would be any press releases, but it would also be any obituaries. So there are those two systems that are working, one’s more timely, which are the posts, and then there are the pages that are more static but can still be obviously updated when staff changes or what have you.

Another really good feature is the user role. So you can create user roles for different members of your team. You can have full access to the administrator user role. And then you could have maybe like a shop manager. So you don’t want them to be able to change any of the infrastructure of the website, but you want them to be able to access any orders, sales, updates and inventory. Maybe you just want someone to add obituaries and approve condolences. That can be done by an editor. If you want someone just to be able to create content but not really change much, they could just have an author role. And so it goes down from there.

And then the features that they’re allowed to be accessible to or have access to are limited as it gets kind of drilled down. So that’s another great feature and we have clients ask us all the time, oh, we’ve got these, like maybe they have an intern coming in that are going to help them but they just want them to have, again, limited access. So it’s very easy to do and there’s no cost. You can have 10 users if you want. It doesn’t matter to us.

WordPress is mobile-friendly, it’s responsive. So no matter what size device they’re watching or looking at the website on, whether it’s like a desktop or laptop or tablet or a phone, if the phone’s vertical or horizontal, it will adjust to that size. We talked about mobile getting there back in 2015. WordPress allowed me to be ahead of the game compared to everyone else having to rewrite all their code for their designs because it wasn’t naturally baked into their website offering.

Then there are widgets. It’s funny how they use these terms because we use the term widget as just something that is like a little tool or something. It’s almost like it’s like a pronoun, but they actually call the elements on the website as widgets and just like furniture in your living room, you can move them around. So if you have three widgets in a row, you can go in and drag them so you change the order or maybe add additional ones. Maybe you want to go from three to six, so now you have two rows of three. WordPress makes it quite easy to add and move the elements around within your framework.

So you’re not, like back in the day of the HTML days, this is what it was like. So you’d get really close and you’d be talking to the client like, “Okay. You’re ready? Does everything look ready? Okay. Because we’re going to make it live and once it’s live, we’re not making any changes for a long time.” They’re like, “Okay, we’re going to go through it one more time.” Where now you can launch it and you want it to be as perfect as possible and make sure the client is happy. But if they have any last-minute changes, we can still do that once the site’s live because it’s easy to change the menu system. Lots of things are like drag and drop.

So if we wanted to take like the price list and move it from about us and move it under to the services tab, we can just drag that across or we can even have that same item listed twice in different navigation, either parent navigation versus child navigation. All these things that you would think about 15 years ago of like, oh, it’d be so much better if they could just do this. And now it’s like, we’ve been able to do that now for five years.

Another cool thing, and Jake, I think you’ll probably want to dig into this, WordPress, they’re more than just this open-source CMS. They’re growing their company. So a big part of… Matt Mullenweg has his annual address – they call it the State of the Word, kind of like the state of the union address. So they have he calls it the state of the word. It just came out recently. He’s talking about all the acquisitions that they’re making, just like big corporations are acquiring businesses. That’s the big part of what you do in funeral service of companies acquiring.

So just picture WordPress as this company that they’ve, and luckily to us, they’ve acquired a lot of the tools that we are using. We use WooCommerce as our e-commerce plugin. They were at one time separate and WordPress acquired them. So great for us now that’s going to be kind of baked in. So we’re not going to have issues. And they’ve acquired the Yoast SEO plugin, which is the world’s most popular WordPress SEO plugin. So even though WordPress is SEO friendly out of the box, the Yoast plugin makes it a lot more search engine friendly. And it just continues to grow.

Then another big element of WordPress is, there’s the core itself and then there’s going to be the themes so that the themes are the look and feel, the design, the template, whatever you want to call it. So you can actually have this website structure and you could change the look of it every other year if you wanted to and never mess with the framework underneath it. You can hide pages. You can move them around. You can change the order. But for Google and Bing and anyone who has indexed these pages, the pages aren’t changing their titles or their past. They’re going to be there. It’s just going to look a little bit different.

So once they buy a website from us, and we’re not leasing a website to them, they buy the website from us, they own it. They can then when it’s been three or four years and maybe they want to change things up or maybe they’ve had an update to their design or brand, we can easily just put basically a new theme, you could call it a new skin or template but in WordPress terms it’s a new theme, and we can create a custom one with the client, we go through the design process again. But instead of going through the whole web development part, which is usually five steps, we just go through the design part again and take that, put it into a staging environment and the client can look at it, test it, make sure it looks the way they want it to look and everything’s in the right place where they want it to be. And then we just then move that over onto the live version and we’re good to go.

So the search engine would never even miss a step or there wouldn’t be any interruption at all. And that’s why we say that with WordPress, you own the site, we build it for you. It can be moved because as you said, there are so many people that can host a WordPress website. There are WordPress technicians around but they don’t have the same funeral knowledge that we have. We like to say that you’ll never have to rebuild another website with that.

The most important feature is their plugins… Plugins are like little applications, little modules. As of December of 2021, there was almost 60,000 free plugins available through the plugin directory at WordPress. It doesn’t mean that they’re all great and it does not mean that you need all of them or even one-tenth of a percent of them. We try to have as few plugins as possible because we want the website to load as quickly as possible. But there are plugins that we do need to have in the website, whether it’s going to be an e-commerce function or whether it’s going to be a forms function. Then there are other ones too to maybe it’s spam prevention, maybe it’s creating a newsletter or capturing emails.

And then also too, these plugins allow you to integrate with other systems. If you’re using Constant Contact, you can then get the Constant Contact plugin. It goes into the WordPress platform and through API language, it will connect the two. It’s very API-friendly. A lot of these other services that are being used online can be integrated with your WordPress website through the plugins. Yes, so it makes the functionality almost limitless. You can get your stats in there, all your social media integrations.

Also a big thing is redirects. Say there is a prominent person that has an obituary and some people have a link to it from… When I was working with McCalls, I made arrangements for a guy named Trev Deeley. Trev Deeley was the Canadian importer for Harley-Davidson, and Harley-Davidson was very famous. He was really close to the founders of Harley-Davidson. But every Harley that came across the border, he got a piece of and he had a huge operation in Vancouver. He had this mansion probably about 10 miles away from where I live right now because he lived just outside of Victoria. So I made arrangements for him, well, prearrangements for him and his wife. And then subsequently when they both died, I made those arrangements.

Why I’m telling the story is that Harley-Davidson, so h-d.com, had a link from their homepage, which is probably one of the top 200 pages in the world, linking directly to the McCall’s website. We could see the traffic coming in. I don’t know how many thousands of visitors came through. So with that power coming in, that’s a very valuable backlink. Now, it didn’t stay forever, they eventually took it off. But where I’m going here is if for some reason we were to, and we’ve had this where a family member would say, and maybe it’s like not a direct family member but their name is listed in the… So here’s a problem of being too search engine friendly, Jake.

A number of times there’ll be like a fringe family member, maybe not a direct descendant or whatever in the obituary and they’ll be doing their vanity searches. I’ll admit, Jake, a few of the odd times I’ve searched for Robin Heppell on the internet to see what comes up. And since these websites, these funeral home websites built on WordPress are so search engine friendly, the number one result for some of these people is this obituary that they’re listed in. Maybe now they’re not part of the family, maybe they’ve divorced or remarried or whatever and they’ll request that their page get taken down.

So I tell all my clients and I tell my team, you’re not allowed to delete an obituary without getting my permission because normally what we could do is we could just take their name out or we could put in their initials or whatever because we don’t want that page deleted. But in the past, sometimes that page would just get deleted and maybe that page has a few links to it. So where I’m going is if that was ever to happen, if that page got deleted, you’d want to at least redirect that page back to like the homepage of the website or back to the obituary listing because there could be some Google authority coming through to that page. So redirects are a big strategy to be used to preserve and continue to grow the SEO value of that website. So there’s a little bit of a backstory there and appreciate you for letting me go on that.

JJ: Yes. That’s interesting.

Rob Heppell: Yes. So there are the redirects, there are newsletters, e-commerce. So there are lots of integrations that we can do to make the site more than just your typical funeral home website.

JJ: I mean, when you hear that, it’s obvious that there’s more, first of all, regardless, there’s just more to a website than just putting up a page and talking about your information. The way in which it’s constructed with these widgets, the wording you use in it, and quite honestly, I always like that that’s done in conjunction with your AdWords account, your Google ads and how people find you. Obviously, WordPress has a lot of bells and whistles, and the thing that’s cool is you’ve got the administrative panel, you can do these things, it’s there, it’s open. But the fact is I’ve never, as much as I could dabble in it, I know what I should be doing on a daily basis as an owner and there are experts like yourself that do this stuff every day. So in particular, as you continue to use this and unlock these tools that WordPress offers, how have you applied it to funeral service? How does it apply to funeral service?

Rob Heppell: Yes, well, by taking these features, and I think the cremation arrangement website platform is a great example where we’re using a couple of plugins plus our custom code and we can then lead people through that process. I explained how we do it with the obituaries too. So instead of just using their core architecture, we change it, customize it, then it can be used as obituaries and condolences. What’s neat too, Jake, and we’re finding this both with our funeral home marketing websites and also our cremation arrangement websites, some of our clients are more technical than others and they like to tweet things. So they actually help us make it better. They’ll ask questions like, oh, could we add this? So we had one client that asked, is there a way when we… So this was for a cremation arrangement website. Are we able to like text, like SMS people when things are done in the process? So once the transfer has been completed, we’d like to send out a text message or an email. We were able to do that.

In the e-commerce platform, you could say what stage. Just like if you’re buying a pair of shoes, that order could be at pending and then it could be shoes located and then shoes packaged, the delivery company notified, and then picked up for shipping. And so we could do the same. So we can do the same. And so one client asked like, well, can we send text messages? Because that’s the one thing with the cremation arrangement websites is that since a lot of it is through the computer, you’re not having that back and forth dialogue that you’d have with a general funeral home client family. So this way you’re keeping them informed. Since they went to the website to do this, they’re probably tech-savvy themselves. So communicate on their level through text messages or email and keep them posted. And obviously, if there’s need to pick up the phone, the client will do that. Like our client would do that or the client family would do that. So that’s one application.

Then another one is with the pandemic, another client where they were getting, the visitations were really big in the area but the local government said, well, you’re only allowed to have like 10 people at a time. To try to manage that when it could be like 100 people coming into visitation over a one or two-day period, they found a plugin that was meant for like a salon plugin to take reservations and said, could we apply this? And they actually got it working and then we went in and tweaked it and worked a little bit better.

So there are neat things like that that we could do without having to rebuild a complete architecture. The nice thing is it’s almost becoming a bit of a community where our clients, they’re making it better for them and then we can help them and we can then offer those additional functionalities to people that need it. You don’t want to just dump that on everyone because not everyone needs all that.

Another part that you kind of alluded to with Google ads, it’s very important I think for all advertising, if you’re advertising to a specific religious group or maybe you’re putting an ad in the Catholic church bulletin, why would you drive them to the homepage of the website versus creating a landing page? And it could be part of your regular navigation or it could be like a hidden page so it operates like a page but it’s not part of the regular navigation. And that page could be all about Catholic funeral services or it could even be about that diocese or even that parish.

If they saw your ad and went to the website and just, boom, they land on this funeral home homepage that has everyone else’s services and there’s the history and there’s pre-planning and there’s grief and all that; or what if they were to land on a page that talked about their denomination or even their parish they’re going to be way more engaged with that. And so you’re meeting that person further down the marketing funnel to build rapport and you’re making them feel special. But then you can do the same for the Baptist and the Methodist. You can build these out.

So just another great feature of having these pages that don’t have to necessarily all be in the navigation and they could do the same for veterans. Usually, the Veterans’ pages are public but there could be one for police officers, fire departments, or maybe you have one for the masons and one for the rotary people. You could do these over and over again to really connect with these different communities, again, all with the power of WordPress’s pages not having to be part of the regular navigation. So we call those hidden landing pages.

JJ: That’s interesting. Well, I think to me, as I hear you talk about that, the fact that’s been a learning lesson for me is that anything you’re doing in marketing at any business, it doesn’t matter whether it’s funeral business or others. Like we have the things we want to do. There’s like funeral business things we want to do in our market. They might be events or lunch and learns, or we’re going in the classified or we’re advertising newspaper or calendars if you’re still doing that. Online ads, everything, social media, it all drives to either call or go to that other door of your funeral home, which is the website. And so a master plan for all that needs to be done. And I think sometimes because I’ve made those mistakes in my past is you see this and you’re like, okay, I need a new website. You don’t tell the others and then they don’t all meld together. So I think it’s very good points you’re making. Sorry I had to just mention that.

Rob Heppell: Oh, for sure. Yes. We’ve got some clients that will, maybe they have different church bulletins, maybe there are 10 different churches, so there’ll be 10 different landing pages. We can then also use a UTM code, like the tracking codes through Google Analytics. Those can be applied to creating redirects. We might take one with a big long string, a UTM, /Catholic/?, and then UTM “source” equals “bulletin” and blah, blah, blah. Well, we can then create like a redirect that would just be /st-patricks. That would then redirect them to this Catholic page. But we would be able to see like, is this church providing a lot more traffic than the other churches? And they can see, is it worthwhile?

And it’s not in a closed environment, like a true e-commerce where you could see exactly how many sales that you got, but you could at least see the interaction. Maybe if you’re having to wonder like, hey, am I getting any traffic at all from advertising in whether it’s the calendars or whatever it is, this at least can give you an idea of, yes, we are getting a little bit of traffic, let’s keep it going. Or, hey, we didn’t get anything for the year, maybe let’s put that $1,000 or $2,000 somewhere else.

JJ: Well, right. And there’s brand recognition. We all know the value of making sure our brand is recognized. But more and more because of the technology and the things that you’re talking about, you don’t want to fall into that category when somebody asks how your marketing’s doing, you say, “Well, I think 50% is working but I don’t know which 50%.” And you’ve just got these tools, to your point, that through these websites especially, that the endpoint where they go to find you, that you can actually track that if you really put some thought to it, which goes well above and beyond of just saying I’ve got a marketing website, and I’ve always found that fascinating and intriguing about what you do because you’ve always had that mindset from early on stage.

Rob Heppell: Well, thanks Jake. And then the nice thing is that it doesn’t stop. In the state of the word from Matt Mullenweg, he’s letting viewers know what’s coming up next. And so there’s going to be what they’re working in the next one or two versions of WordPress, so either 5.9 or 6.0, is going to be a direct link to a repository of stock images. So you could be creating whether it’s an obituary or whether it’s a page and instead of what some people have done, I don’t think it happens that much anymore, but go to Google images, grab an image even though you may not have permission to do so, put it in your website. Then, unfortunately, a year or two later, you get a demand letter for $750 saying you have to take this image down.

Now you’ll be able to be right inside your page and build that content for the page, go to media, and then it’ll be like upload, use it from your current library, or get from the stock image gallery. And you could then just put in the search term of what you’re looking for and then select an image and it’s free to use because it’s going to be part of the overall WordPress ecosystem. So that’s really cool.

And what that will also then do, so this is me thinking how can we choose that, well, for obituaries, you might be able or you would be able to then maybe change like the background, the header for that one obituary. Maybe they were a golfer. So you could put like a background of a golf course instead of it just being the general picture of the person. You’d still have that but like the header background could be something that either the funeral home chooses or the family makes a suggestion. So it’s going to make that then that much more meaningful. So that’s what we’re looking forward to and we’re getting our clients trained on that and letting them know how that’s all going to work.

Then there’s a hosting part, and I think this is one thing that we as a team do really well, the hosting of support. We want to give service to our clients, just like they give service to their client families. We use high-performance WordPress-specific web servers, backups are made on a daily basis. So if anything ever happened, we can go back and restore backup so there’s not a problem there.

With Funeral Results Marketing, you own your website. So since it can be moved to any compatible hosting platform, we have to work hard for your business. We have to work hard every month. So we know that. So it keeps us providing great… So we’re not going to rest on our laurels where other people who are kind of stuck in a proprietary system, it’s hard to move. I get it as a business strategy of making something that people want to use and making it hard for them to leave. We’ve taken the more open approach of like, “Hey, you know what, we’re going to build this for you and you can move it if you want, but we’re going to provide you really great service and also insight that you want to stay with us and you have the choice.” So they’re wanting to stay instead of being forced to stay.

JJ: I love it.

Rob Heppell: Yes. Jake, that kind of walks us through what is WordPress, how it’s applied, what can it do for funeral homes and where we’re going to go next. I know that there are some folks that have proprietary systems and maybe they’re tired of being kind of stuck into something. There’s a lot more freedom with a WordPress website and you’re not, rarely do we say, “Oh, you can’t do that.” Now, there might be something that we would recommend not to do just based on our experience and what it could change, but there’s a lot more flexibility. And then if they want to build something off of it or add to it, rarely there’s a no, you can’t do that, and we would then work through some of those. Maybe there’s a custom application that they would want to have built-in. Just like whether it’s the text messages or the reservations, that can be done.

And then there’s also a number of people who have a WordPress website that they have a local marketing company they’ve built for them. What we find with those local marketers is they’re doing the new brand, the style guide, they’re maybe writing some content, everything looks great, and they can build a website but they’re not in it for the long game. They’re going to move on to another client. And so the hosting isn’t the same as what we have.

What we offer is we’ll migrate. If someone has a WordPress website and it’s being hosted somewhere else, we’ll migrate it for free over to our hosting platform and then just pay our monthly hosting, which is quite reasonable. And then what we do find is sometimes there are some security tweaks because there hasn’t been a lot of attention paid for it. Maybe things are out of date, we’ll get everything up to date, everything secure and move on. Maybe they want a new theme. But they don’t need to have a whole new website built because they’ve already got the platform. So that’s what we can do for the funeral professionals out there that are looking to maybe move to WordPress or move their WordPress website to us.

JJ: Yes. I think WordPress is, my big thing for me in the different businesses I own, what is the scalability and redundancy of a business? With WordPress in the whole marketing strategy, the scalability is there. I mean, you can expand on it, you can change it, you can get it to a point where… You can do just keep adding on to it. It’s just incredible what this guy’s done. You’re talking about the owner. But then the redundancy as well, like a question always is, what happens if we get hit by a bus, or a beer truck, whatever you choose. But it really provides some nice redundancy.

And I think a lot of that goes into, for you, what resonated with me is we’ve both done funeral arrangements, we’ve been in the funeral home. We know what everybody should be doing on a daily basis. This stuff should be working, should be handled and it should be a seamless platform with all the other marketing strategies so that the funeral arrangement team directors can do their job and know that the company is being well represented in the community. So I just like the approach.

Rob Heppell: Yes. It’s served me well, it’s served our clients well for well over a decade. I’m just glad that it was, way back to that meeting in the coffee shop with Tris, him telling me which platform to go through. The great thing is they, Matt Mullenweg and his team, they’re like you Jake, they’re continually wanting to grow, make it better, keep going so we can then just connect the dots and apply it to funeral service. Yes, with that, Jake, I think next time, we’ve dug in here to one of the tools for funeral results. I think maybe we should dig into performance tracker and how that came about and where it is today and how that helps funeral homes run other parts of their business successfully. What do you think about that?

JJ: Definitely. I’d love to do it. I think it falls right along that line of redundancy and scalability. So it’ll be fun to share.

Rob Heppell: Great. Okay. Well, to you listening, thanks again for sharing your time with us today. As we said before, our goal is to make sure that we share our experience and insights that it will help yourself and other funeral professionals serve more client families and provide more meaningful services. So check back soon for another episode of the Funeral X Podcast. Until next time, this has been JJ and Rob Heppell.

Fact Check: Rob referred to the creator of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg as a billionaire but at the time of the recording, his net worth is estimated at $450 Million and he is from Houston, Texas, not Austin, Texas.

 

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