What Happens to a CaringBridge Site After Someone Dies (and Where to Move It)
The short answer: nothing happens to a CaringBridge site by itself when the person dies. It stays online, exactly as it was, until an author or co-author asks CaringBridge to deactivate or delete it. There is no export button and no PDF option, so anything you want to keep has to be copied out by hand. And the setting that used to turn a site into a memorial has been paused while CaringBridge moves everyone to its new design. Most families end up doing three things: writing one last post, saving the journal and the comments somewhere safe, and building a separate memorial page for the years ahead.
This guide is for the person who has been running the site, or who has just been handed it. Everything about how CaringBridge works below comes from its own help center as of October 2026; features change, so check there before you rely on a detail.
What CaringBridge is, and what it was built for
CaringBridge is a nonprofit, ad-free site for sharing health updates. A family opens a page during an illness, posts journal entries, and friends leave comments and offers of help. It is free, and it is very good at that job.
It was not built for what comes after. The page is organised as a feed of updates about a health journey, with a "Ways to Help" section, meal trains and fundraising tiles alongside. Once the person has died, the feed stops, the help offers no longer apply, and the page quietly turns into a record of the hardest months rather than of a whole life. That is the gap this guide is about.
What actually happens to the site
It stays up. CaringBridge does not take a page down when someone dies. Deactivating or deleting a page only happens when the page owner or a co-author asks for it in writing, through the Contact Us form in the help center. Until then the site is there, visible to whoever could see it before, and it will keep showing up in searches if searchability was left on.
The memorial setting is paused. CaringBridge used to let authors set a page as a memorial for the patient. Its help center now says that option has been temporarily removed while all users are moved to the new experience, and suggests pinning posts to the top of the feed instead. So for now there is no switch that changes the page's framing from "updates" to "in memory of".
Nothing can be exported. The help center is direct about this: CaringBridge does not support printing pages or creating PDFs. The workarounds it offers are the browser's own print command and screenshots. There is no download of the journal, the comments, or the photos as a set.
Deleting is permanent and slow. A deletion request has to come from the page owner or a co-author. Once it is in, the page is deactivated immediately and becomes inaccessible to everyone while the deletion runs, which can take up to 90 days. There is no recovery after that. Deactivation, by contrast, can be undone, which makes it the safer first step if the family is not sure.
Co-authors matter more now than before. A page can have any number of co-authors, and only an author or co-author can change settings or ask for the page to be deactivated or deleted. If the person who died was the only author, nobody else can manage the page without going through CaringBridge's Care Team, and they will want the email address the account was opened with. If you are reading this before the death rather than after it, adding a co-author today is the single most useful thing you can do.
Who can act, and in what order
Decide who is in charge of the page before anything is changed. The usual rule for a memorial applies here: the person who built it has the account, but the family of the person it is about has the say. If those are different people, a short conversation now avoids a very bad one later. Our guide to who inherits an online memorial walks through the same question for memorial sites, and the logic is identical.
Then, in order:
- Post the news, once. One final entry from the family, with the date, the funeral or service details if they are set, and a sentence about what the page will become. Pin it to the top so it is the first thing visitors see. Comments on that post are the last round of messages the page will collect, and they are often the ones worth keeping most.
- Turn off what no longer applies. Meal trains, gift cards and the GoFundMe tile can each be switched off in the page settings. Leaving a fundraising tile up after a death without saying what the money is now for makes people uneasy.
- Check who can see it. The Private setting means visitors must be approved. Searchability and search engine indexing are separate toggles. A family that wants the page to stay as a quiet archive usually turns indexing off; one that wants distant friends to find the news leaves it on for a few weeks.
- Do not delete anything yet. Deactivation can wait. Deletion cannot be undone, and the first months are not the time to decide what the family will want in ten years.
What to save, and how
Because there is no export, saving means copying. It is tedious, and it is worth doing in the first few weeks while the page is still fresh in everyone's mind and before anyone acts on a bad day.
The journal entries. Open each post and copy the text into a document, with the date at the top. If there are many, the browser's print command with "save as PDF" selected will capture a page at a time, formatting and all. Do the last six months first; those are the entries the family will reread.
The comments. These are the part people forget and miss most. Friends wrote things in those comments that they will never say out loud at a funeral. Copy them under the post they belong to, with the name of the person who wrote them.
The photos. Download each one at full size from the gallery rather than screenshotting it. Name the files with a date if you can.
Anything the person wrote themselves. If they were posting their own updates, those entries are in their voice, and that voice is now the rarest thing you own. Keep them separately. Preserving a loved one's voice covers what to do with recordings and writing like this once you have them.
Put the whole folder in two places: a cloud drive that another family member can also open, and a copy on a physical drive. CaringBridge's own permanence is not the issue; the issue is that only one or two people can currently get to it.
Where it goes next
A CaringBridge page can stay as it is indefinitely, and some families leave it that way. But the question most of them ask within a few months is where the person's life is going to live online, as opposed to their illness. There are three common answers.
Leave the page and build a memorial elsewhere. This is what most families do. The CaringBridge site stays as the record of that year, searchable or not as you choose, and a separate memorial page holds the photographs from before the illness, the life story, and the messages people want to leave on anniversaries. The two can link to each other. If you are choosing a service, the best online memorial websites compares the main ones on cost and permanence, and memorial website examples shows what finished pages look like.
Use a Facebook memorial. If the person had a Facebook account and most of the family is there, memorialising it keeps their own posts and photos in place. It is not a good fit for a person who was not on Facebook, or for a family that wants a page they control. Online memorial vs Facebook memorial lays out the trade.
Use the obituary page. Funeral home and newspaper obituary pages collect condolences in the first weeks and then go quiet. They are fine as the record of the service. They are not somewhere people return to a year later.
Whichever you pick, move the saved journal and comments into it deliberately rather than all at once. A memorial page that opens with the last six months of medical updates reads like a chart. One that opens with a photograph from 1986 and has the journal as one chapter near the end reads like a life.
If you built the CaringBridge page and are not family
Caregivers, close friends and adult children of a second marriage often end up running these pages. If that is you, two things. First, the family of the person who died gets to decide what happens to it, even if you did all the work; offer them co-author access or hand over the saved folder, and say so plainly. Second, do not delete it on their behalf. Deactivate if they ask, and leave the permanent step to them.
On GetMemorial
GetMemorial is one of the places families move to after CaringBridge. A page holds photo and video albums, a life story written in sections, and a guest book where visitors leave messages and light candles, and it can be public, locked with an access code, or visible only to you. Co-managers can share the work the way CaringBridge co-authors did. The journal you saved pastes into the life story as its own chapter, and the comments you copied can go in as tributes under the names of the people who wrote them. How to create a free online memorial is the step-by-step.
Quick answers
Does a CaringBridge site expire or get deleted after a death? No. It stays online until the page owner or a co-author asks CaringBridge in writing to deactivate or delete it.
Can I download the journal? Not as a file. CaringBridge does not offer printing, PDFs or exports. Use the browser's print-to-PDF on each page, or copy the text by hand.
Can I turn the page into a memorial? Not at the moment. The memorial setting has been temporarily removed while CaringBridge moves users to its new design. Pin a final post to the top instead.
The person who died was the only author. What now? Contact CaringBridge's Care Team through the help center. They will ask for the email address the account was opened with, so start by finding that.
Should we delete it? Not in the first months. Deactivation is reversible; deletion is not and takes up to 90 days. Decide later, together.
GetMemorial helps families build beautiful, lasting online memorials in minutes — a permanent home for photos, stories and the messages people leave over the years. Build yours at GetMemorial.com.
