How Online Wills Work

The process usually starts with questions about you and your family: your marital status, whether you have children, and who you would like as executor, the person who administers your estate after you die. From there it moves to your wishes: specific gifts to particular people, guardians for children under 18, and who should inherit the residue, everything left once gifts and debts are dealt with.

Good services ask these in a logical order and explain unfamiliar terms as they go, so you are not expected to already know legal vocabulary like 'residuary estate' or 'per stirpes' before you can answer sensibly.

Behind the scenes, the service takes your specific answers and builds them into the formal clauses a will actually needs: an executor appointment clause, gift clauses, a residue clause, and any guardian appointments. This is different from a blank template you fill in yourself, because the final wording is generated to match your circumstances rather than being edited by hand.

This matters for validity as much as convenience: precisely worded clauses reduce the risk of ambiguity that could otherwise cause confusion or dispute after your death.

Once your will is drafted, you should be able to review the full document before anything is finalised, checking names, addresses, gift descriptions and the residue clause all match what you intended. A well-built service lets you go back and revise any answer at this stage without extra charge.

Take this review seriously. It is far easier to correct a mistake, a wrong name, an outdated address, a forgotten gift, at this stage than after the document has been signed and witnessed.

This is the one part of the process that cannot happen online. Under section 9 of the Wills Act 1837, your will must be in writing and signed by you (or someone else in your presence and at your direction), with your signature made or acknowledged in front of two witnesses present together, who then also sign the will themselves in your presence.

Your witnesses must be independent adults who are not beneficiaries of the will, and not married to or in a civil partnership with a beneficiary, otherwise that beneficiary loses their gift under section 15 of the Act. A good online service gives you clear written instructions for this step, since it is the single most common way DIY wills fail.

Once signed, your will becomes a physical document that needs to be kept somewhere safe and findable, such as a fireproof box at home, with a solicitor, or in a dedicated will storage service. Make sure your executor knows where it is, since a valid will nobody can find causes the same problems as having no will at all.

The online process is not a one-off event you never revisit. Major life changes, marriage, divorce, a new child, buying property, are all good reasons to make a new will, and marriage in particular automatically revokes an earlier will unless it was made in contemplation of that marriage.