Professional services website scorecard

Why these twelve

Choosing an accountant, a solicitor, a broker or an adviser is a high-trust, low-frequency decision. Nobody does it often, everybody is slightly worried about getting it wrong, and almost everyone checks two or three firms before contacting any of them.

That checking follows a pattern. Can I afford this. Are they real. Are they qualified. Has anyone else used them. What happens if I get in touch. The twelve checks above are that pattern, roughly in the order a visitor works through it. A site can be beautifully designed and still fail most of them.

The three that move the needle most

• Some indication of price. The most common single reason a qualified visitor leaves. They are not looking for cheap, they are looking for evidence they are in the right place.
• A way to make contact that is not a phone call. A large share of enquiries now come from people who will not phone a stranger. For them a phone number on its own is not a call to action.
• A promise about what happens next. One sentence about how quickly you reply, next to the form. It is the cheapest item on this list and one of the most effective.

What this scorecard cannot tell you

You are marking your own homework, which has limits. You already know where everything is on your site, so navigation always feels obvious. You have seen the photos a hundred times, so they stop registering. And nothing here measures the technical layer underneath: how you actually load on a phone on mobile data, whether your pages are indexed, whether the firm two streets away outranks you and why.

Those things need someone outside the building to look. That is what our audit is for, and it is done by a person rather than a script.

Common questions

What is a good score? Ten or more out of twelve is strong. Most professional services sites we look at land between five and eight, because the basics are there and the trust signals are not. Below four is usually a site that was built once and never revisited.

Should an accountant or solicitor really publish fees? Something, yes. Not necessarily a full price list. A from figure, a typical range, or a worked example is enough to stop the visitor who assumes you are out of their budget and leaves without asking. Silence on price is not neutral, it is read as expensive.

Why does an anonymous testimonial score zero? Because a cautious buyer discounts it entirely. A quote attributed to a named person at a named business can be checked, and something checkable is the whole point of a testimonial. An initial and a county reads as invented, whether or not it is.

Does this replace a proper audit? No. This is a structured self-assessment: you are marking your own work, and you cannot see your own site the way a stranger does. It is a good way to find the obvious gaps quickly. For the things you cannot self-assess, like speed on a real device, technical SEO, or how you actually compare to the firm down the road, ask us for an audit.

Built by Charged Studio, a web design studio in Devon. More on the thinking behind this in our guide to website design for accountants.