And what to do about it!

You have a beautiful website. The photos are lovely. The colours feel right. Your About page is warm and personal. And yet the enquiries aren’t coming in the way you hoped. Or the people who do land on your site seem to drift away without getting in touch.

If this sounds familiar, you are in very good company. A celebrant website not converting is one of the most common issues I see when I work with celebrants on their businesses and almost always, the problem isn’t the aesthetics. It’s something structural. Something about how the site is organised, what it says, and how it guides visitors from curious to enquiring.

The good news is that most of these problems are eminently fixable. Let me walk you through the most common ones.

The site is written for you, not for them

This is the most common issue I encounter, and it’s completely understandable. When you build your website, you are naturally thinking about who you are, what you do, and what you want people to know. As a result, the homepage leads with your name, your journey into celebrancy, your values. The about page goes deep on your background.

None of this is wrong. But it’s in the wrong order.

The person landing on your website at 10pm on a Tuesday has one thing on their mind: can this person help me create the ceremony I’m imagining? They’re scanning your site for signals that you understand what they want – not primarily for information about who you are.

Your homepage needs to lead with them. Their ceremony. What they’re looking for. The feeling they want the day to create. Your story and personality follow from that – and they matter enormously – but they work best once a visitor is already nodding along thinking “yes, this person gets it.”

Ask yourself: within the first few seconds of landing on your homepage, does a visitor understand what you do, who you do it for, and why they should choose you? If they have to read three paragraphs to get there, you’ve probably already lost some of them.

There’s no clear next step

A celebrant website not converting often comes down to one simple thing: the visitor doesn’t know what to do next.

They’ve read your pages. They like what they see. And then… they have to go looking for a contact button, or they find a contact page that just has a generic form with no warmth or context. The momentum stalls. They close the tab, tell themselves they’ll come back to it, and never do.

Every page on your site should have a clear, warm invitation to take the next step. Not a hard sell – just a gentle, obvious signal of what to do if they’d like to find out more. “I’d love to have a conversation” with a button that takes them directly to your contact form or booking calendar. Make it frictionless. Make it feel like the natural continuation of the conversation your website has started.

Your testimonials aren’t doing enough work

Reviews and testimonials are among the most powerful things on a celebrant’s website. They answer the question the visitor is really asking: “Is this person as good as they seem?”

But there’s a significant difference between testimonials that sit quietly at the bottom of a page and testimonials that actively do work for you. The most effective ones are specific (“she captured exactly who Mum was, even though they’d never met”), emotional (“I didn’t think I could feel grateful at a funeral, but I did”), and placed where visitors are most likely to be hesitating – on your homepage, near your pricing information, on your contact page.

If your testimonials are all vague (“Dinah was wonderful — highly recommend!”) or buried in a dedicated reviews tab that visitors have to go looking for, they’re not converting anyone. Think about where uncertainty lives on your site, and put your strongest testimonials right there.

Your pricing is either missing or confusing

This is a genuinely contested area among celebrants, and I understand the hesitation about putting fees online. But a celebrant website not converting is very often connected to pricing that is either completely absent or so vague it creates more questions than it answers.

The couples or families visiting your site will almost certainly be thinking about cost. If your website gives them no indication whatsoever, some of them will simply move on to someone who does. Others will enquire, but may feel a flash of anxiety when they ask, as though cost is a sensitive or embarrassing subject.

You don’t have to publish an exact figure. But “from £X” or a brief explanation of how your pricing works (what’s included, what factors influence the fee, that you’re happy to talk through options) goes a long way towards making people feel safe enough to enquire. It removes a barrier. And removing barriers is exactly what a converting website does.

The site isn’t telling a story

The most effective celebrant websites don’t just list services and show nice photos. They take the visitor on a journey – from “I’m looking for someone to do a ceremony” to “I can imagine this person doing my ceremony.”

That journey is emotional as much as informational. It involves showing what a ceremony with you actually feels like. Real moments from real ceremonies, described in a way that helps someone imagine their own day. Specific detail rather than generic warmth. The couple who wrote their own vows while walking their dog and asked you to weave that into the ceremony. The family who brought their mother’s favourite album and played it as people arrived. The naming ceremony that happened on a beach at sunset.

Specificity builds trust in a way that general claims never can. “I create bespoke, heartfelt ceremonies” tells a visitor very little. The dog-walking vows story tells them everything they need to know about how you work.

A practical starting point

If you’re looking at your website thinking “where do I even begin?”  here’s my suggestion. Do this exercise: look at your site as though you’re a couple or a family who knows nothing about you, has found you via a Google search, and has three minutes to decide whether to get in touch.

What do you see? What’s missing? What would make you hesitate?

The answers to those questions are your to-do list.

If your celebrant website not converting is something you’d like to work through as part of your broader business development, I offer coaching for celebrants at all stages of their career. Get in touch and let’s talk about where to start.

And if you’re exploring funeral or wedding celebrancy as a career and wondering what building a successful business involves, I’d love to have a conversation. Book an Informed Decision Session.

Warmly, Dinah
She/Her