Why FrontRunner Websites Rank Poorly (And What to Do About It)

FrontRunner Professional is one of the most widely used funeral home website platforms in North America. It is also one of the most technically problematic from an SEO perspective. Understanding why FrontRunner sites consistently underperform in local search — and what the alternatives are — is essential for any funeral home owner evaluating their digital marketing options.

The Technical Problems

Shared template architecture: Every FrontRunner site is built from the same template library. Google's duplicate content detection identifies these sites as low-originality and suppresses their rankings accordingly. Core Web Vitals failures: FrontRunner sites consistently score in the "Poor" range for Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift on mobile — the two metrics most directly correlated with ranking suppression. Centralized hosting: All FrontRunner sites are hosted on shared infrastructure. When that infrastructure has performance issues, every site on the platform is affected simultaneously.

The Ownership Problem

Beyond the technical issues, FrontRunner sites present an ownership problem. The codebase, the hosting, and the CMS are all controlled by FrontRunner. When a funeral home cancels their FrontRunner subscription, they lose their website. Any SEO authority built on that domain through FrontRunner's platform is tied to FrontRunner's infrastructure — not to the funeral home's domain in a portable way.

What to Do About It

The solution is not necessarily to cancel FrontRunner immediately. The management software components — case management, obituary publishing, staff workflows — may be valuable and worth retaining. The solution is to build a satellite property on a domain you own, optimize it properly, and migrate your Google Business Profile to point to it. The FrontRunner site continues handling obituary publishing. The satellite property handles lead generation, pre-need captures, and local SEO.