Website design for accountants: what a good accountancy website actually needs

Most accountancy websites are built for other accountants. They list the qualifications, name the software partners and deploy the word "bespoke" at least once, usually near a photograph of a calculator. Meanwhile the person actually visiting is a plumber at ten o'clock at night wondering whether he has just gone over the VAT threshold and, if so, whether it matters. Here is what a site for that person needs, and it is not the calculator photograph.

Start with the question they arrived with

Nobody searches for an accountant because they fancy one. They search because something has happened: turnover has crept up, a letter has arrived from HMRC in the sort of envelope that makes you sit down, or a company has been set up on a Tuesday afternoon and now there are duties nobody mentioned at the time. Your website is competing with that worry for their attention, and it wins by answering the question they came with, not by describing your commitment to excellence.

A plainly written page will do for many questions and should. But for the questions with numbers in them, a live tool does something a paragraph cannot, which is answer their case rather than the general one. A VAT threshold checker. A Making Tax Digital checker. A take-home pay estimate. The visitor moves a slider, sees a figure, and now has a reason to ring you rather than a reason to keep scrolling. We build these for firms, and you can try the ones on our accountants page, but the principle holds whoever builds them: the site should do something useful before it asks for anything.

Show the humans

Accountancy is sold on trust and trust is sold on faces. A page of real photographs of the actual people, with their first names and what they do, will outperform any quantity of copy about values. If the photographs are ten years old, or feature people who have since left, that is worse than having none, because now the visitor is being introduced to a firm that no longer exists. Budget for a photographer. It is the most cost-effective spend on the entire site and the one most reliably skipped.

Say what you charge, or say why you won't

This is the contested one, so here is both sides without a thumb on the scale. Publishing fees suits fixed-fee practices with clear packages: a sole trader bundle, a limited company bundle, payroll per employee. It filters out the clients who were never going to pay your rates and it removes an awkward conversation from the first meeting. It suits bespoke practices less, because for them the honest answer really is "it depends on the state of your books", and a number on a website would be a fiction.

What does not work, for either kind of practice, is silence. If you do not publish fees, publish how you price: the factors, a typical range, and what a first meeting costs, which should ideally be nothing. A visitor who can find no sense of price assumes the worst and leaves. A visitor who reads "most sole traders pay between this and this a year, and here is what moves it" stays, because you have treated them like an adult.

Fewer pages, better written

The temptation is a page for every service: bookkeeping, VAT, payroll, self assessment, corporation tax, CIS, and onwards until there are fourteen pages saying nearly the same thing in nearly the same words, each one beginning "we take the stress out of". Search engines have become good at noticing this, and clients never liked it in the first place. Four or five pages that genuinely differ, each written for a particular sort of client, will do more than fourteen that do not.

And write them like a person. "We help you stay compliant" says nothing at all. "We file your VAT return every quarter and tell you what you owe three weeks before it is due" says everything, and, not by coincidence, is roughly what people type into search engines.

Be careful what the site appears to promise

Anything on the site that could be read as advice needs a moment's thought, and tools need more than a moment. A calculator that produces a figure without saying what it assumes is a complaint waiting to be written. A page that says "you should" rather than "you may want to" is a page a client can quote back at you. Keep the tools plainly labelled as illustrations, keep the assumptions visible, and keep the last step "speak to us" rather than "here is your answer". This is not about lawyers, or not only. It is about the visitor understanding what they are looking at, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Local signals still matter

For a Swansea practice, the postcode is a feature. Put the real address on every page. Claim and complete the Google Business Profile with the same name, address and phone number the site uses, to the character, because a stray comma in the address is apparently enough to confuse the most sophisticated search engine ever built. Mention the areas you actually serve: Uplands, Sketty, Gorseinon, the SA1 waterfront. It feels parochial and it is precisely how people find a local accountant.

What you can skip

A blog you will not update. A chatbot. A stock photograph of a calculator on a desk, or a stock photograph of a desk. A "client portal" that is a link to your software provider's login page with your logo above it. An awards strip from bodies nobody has heard of. Each of these appears on a great many accountancy websites, and not one of them has ever caused a plumber to ring an accountant at ten o'clock at night.

In short

Answer the question, show the people, be clear about money, write less and write it properly, mind what the site appears to promise, and let it say where you are. That is a good accountancy website. None of it is complicated, which is perhaps why so few of them manage it. If you would like to see what yours could look like, we will mock up the homepage for nothing, and you keep the mock-up whether or not you go ahead.