Since April 2026, sole traders and landlords with more than £50,000 of qualifying income have been filing quarterly. HMRC reported over 436,000 first updates by the 7 August deadline, from more than 570,000 sign ups, and the threshold drops to £30,000 in April 2027. A lot of people have just discovered they need an accountant.
Most practice websites cannot be told apart, though. Same handshake photograph, same service list written in the language of compliance rather than the reader's. This is about web design for accountants that does the opposite: what a practice site is actually for, how to niche it by client type, what UK rules require on it, and how onboarding should work without asking a stranger to email you their UTR.
The premise throughout is that you do not want more enquiries. You want fewer and better matched ones, from people you can serve profitably and would be happy to see on a Tuesday in January.
Key takeaways
- Making Tax Digital for Income Tax became mandatory above £50,000 of qualifying income in April 2026 and drops to £30,000 in April 2027, so the searching population grows again next spring.
- A practice website should filter rather than fish: pages built around client type beat a list of services, because a contractor searching for CIS help will not read past a generic page.
- The Provision of Services Regulations 2009 require your professional indemnity insurer's name and address and the territorial coverage of the policy to be made available, which is why most firms carry a provision of services page.
- Named partners with real photographs, a fees page with from prices and a stated response time answer the three questions every prospect silently has.
- A contact form is the wrong place for a UTR, a National Insurance number or a set of accounts. Route documents to a portal and say so on the page.
What web design for accountants has to do differently
Every service business wants a website that converts. A practice has three constraints that a plumber or a restaurant does not, and they change the whole design brief.
The first is that your buyer is numerate and sceptical by training. Vague claims and unpriced services do more damage here than almost anywhere, because your reader assesses statements for a living. The second is that the relationship is long and switching is a chore, so the website is not closing a sale, it is removing enough doubt for somebody to spend forty minutes on a call. The third is regulation: you cannot describe the firm however you like, and the site carries disclosure obligations a landscaper does not.
That pushes a practice site towards specificity and away from polish. Numbers, names, deadlines, prices, plain answers. The firms that win online are rarely the best looking. They are the ones that said something checkable.
Niche the site by client type, not by service list
Almost every practice website is organised by service: self assessment, VAT, payroll, year end accounts, corporation tax. That structure is written from the inside of the firm looking out. Nobody searches for themselves as a service line. They search as a type of person with a specific problem, and the practice that speaks to that type wins the enquiry from three firms that technically do the same work.
Keep the service pages. They rank and they answer questions. Then build a second layer above them, one page per client type, each written as though the reader is the only person you serve.
Contractors and subcontractors
The reader is worried about CIS deductions, whether to incorporate, and whether the last accountant filed something late. The page should name CIS in the heading, explain gross payment status in two sentences, say what monthly bookkeeping costs, and mention that you deal with the verification calls so they do not have to.
Landlords
This is the client type Making Tax Digital has just created in volume. A landlord with four properties who has never filed anything quarterly wants to know which software, how much it adds to the fee, and what happens if they miss an update. Answer those three in order, on one page, and you will out-convert every firm that buried MTD in a news post from 2024.
Farms, estates and rural businesses
Averaging, herd basis, agricultural property relief, diversification into holiday lets and weddings. Around Bury St Edmunds, Thetford and out into the fens this is a real specialism, and a page that proves it pulls enquiries from a wide radius. A farming client will drive forty minutes for an accountant who already understands the question.
Ecommerce and online sellers
Marketplace fee reconciliation, VAT on cross border sales, inventory valuation. These clients are young and comparison driven, and they judge you almost entirely on whether the page sounds like it was written by somebody who has seen a marketplace settlement report.
Four pages like that will do more than forty blog posts. If you want help deciding which client types are actually worth a page in your area, that research is the whole point of planning the pages before building them.
The pages a practice website needs, in build order
| Page | What it is for | Build order |
|---|
| Home | Says who you help, where, and what happens next. One sentence, above the fold. | 1 |
| Who we are, with photographs | Names, faces, qualifications and how long each person has been doing this. | 2 |
| Fees | From prices by client type. The single biggest filter on wasted meetings. | 3 |
| One page per client type | Wins the searches with intent and does the persuading before contact. | 4 |
| One page per core service | Catches the specific query: CIS returns, payroll, VAT registration, R&D claims. | 5 |
| Switching accountants | Removes the biggest objection by explaining professional clearance in five steps. | 6 |
| Provision of services and regulatory information | PII details, registration numbers, complaints route, company details. | 7 |
| Contact, with a portal link in the navigation | Separates a new enquiry from an existing client with a document to send. | 8 |
Note what is not on that list. A news feed of announcements copied from HMRC. Stock photographs. A carousel of software vendor logos. The news feed actively hurts, because a post dated 2023 at the top of your blog tells a prospect the practice stopped paying attention.
Trust signals, and the exact worry each one answers
Trust on a practice website is not a feeling, it is a set of specific anxieties being closed one at a time.
| What you put on the page | The worry it settles |
|---|
| Named people with real photographs and qualifications | Who will actually handle my accounts, and are they qualified? |
| From prices, by client type | Am I about to waste an hour finding out I cannot afford this? |
| A stated response time, and who answers out of season | Will anyone reply in the last week of January? |
| Institute membership and registration numbers | Is this firm actually regulated, and by whom? |
| Recent reviews, quoted as text on the page | Do people like me stay with them? |
| A written switching process | How much hassle is leaving my current accountant? |
Quote the reviews as text rather than relying only on an embedded widget, because a widget that loads its content from a third party script can be effectively invisible to a crawler and to the systems that summarise you. The same goes for anything important trapped in a PDF.
What UK rules require on an accountancy website
This is the section most practice websites get partly wrong, usually by omission. Check each item against your own institute's current guidance, because the detail varies by firm type and by what you are registered to do.
- Company details. If you trade through a limited company or LLP, your registered name, company number, place of registration and registered office address belong on the site, conventionally in the footer or on a legal page.
- VAT number, if you are registered.
- Professional indemnity insurance. Under the Provision of Services Regulations 2009 the insurer's name and address and the territorial coverage of the policy must be available to clients. Most firms handle this with a short provision of services page, often worded as cover excluding work carried out from an office in the United States or Canada.
- Regulated status and registration numbers. Audit registration with the wording your institute specifies, plus the register reference number, and the equivalent for probate or investment business where a licence applies. Describing the firm as Chartered Accountants is itself a regulated statement.
- Complaints route. Your internal procedure, then the escalation path to your institute, stated plainly rather than buried in the engagement letter.
- Data protection. Your ICO registration and a privacy notice that actually describes what you do with client data, which matters more than usual for a firm holding financial records.
- Disclaimers on free content. Blog posts, calculators and tax tables should say plainly that they are general information rather than advice, and every rates page needs a visible date. Undated tax content is both a liability and a ranking problem.
None of it is decorative. A prospect choosing between two firms who finds one cannot be verified picks the other, and the systems that summarise practices in an answer behave the same way.
Onboarding, portals and what should never go through a web form
The website's job does not end at the enquiry. It should make switching feel small and make the first two weeks feel organised, because that is when a new client decides whether they made a good decision.
Write the switching process out as five steps: sign the engagement letter, professional clearance letter to the outgoing accountant, anti money laundering identity checks, HMRC authorisation, collection of the last accounts. Naming the steps removes most of the fear, and the fear is why people stay with an accountant they have stopped rating.
Keep the portal separate and visible
Put a client login in the main navigation. It reassures a prospect that the firm has a system, and it stops existing clients emailing documents because they could not find where to put them. Run the portal on its own subdomain rather than rebuilding it inside the marketing site, so a website redesign never risks the thing clients log into every month.
Be strict about the contact form. Name, email, type of business, one line on what they need. Not a UTR, a National Insurance number, a date of birth or an attachment, because a standard form posts that data around in ways you would not accept from a client. One sentence saying please use the portal for documents reads as competence, not fussiness.
What a practice website should cost, and what it needs to return
For a small or medium UK practice the sensible range is a monthly plan rather than a large one off build. Ours run at £189 a month for Starter, £249 for Business and £329 for Market Leader, each covering the Webflow build, hosting, unlimited edits, and the monthly search work and reporting in the same payment rather than as a retainer added later. Full details sit on the pricing page, and how the search side works is set out under the search work included in every plan.
Run the return calculation on your own numbers. If an owner managed limited company client is worth £1,200 to £2,500 a year and stays several years, a £249 plan needs about one and a half new clients a year to break even. Practices hesitate because the last website produced nothing, which is usually a structure problem rather than a spend problem. Four client type pages cost the same to build as four pages about your values.
The other half of getting found is being named when somebody asks an assistant for an accountant rather than typing into Google, which is a different job with a lot of overlap. We covered the mechanics of that in a separate piece on being cited by ChatGPT in the UK, and the underlying trust work in the features that make a small business site credible.
Frequently asked questions
What should an accountancy website include?
At minimum: a home page stating who you help and where, named people with photographs and qualifications, a fees page with from prices, a page for each core service, a page for each client type you want more of, a written switching process, your regulatory and insurance disclosures, and a contact page with a separate client portal link.
How do accountants get more clients online?
By being specific rather than visible. Pages written for one client type, priced honestly, with named people behind them, convert far better than a general practice page competing with every other firm in the county. Add consistent Google reviews and a properly filled Business Profile, and local searches with real intent start landing on pages built to answer them.
Does an accountancy practice need a client portal?
Yes, and it should be linked from the main navigation. It keeps records and identity documents out of email, gives clients one place to upload, and signals to a prospect that the firm runs on systems. Keep it on its own subdomain so redesigning the marketing site never disturbs the thing clients log into.
What does ICAEW require on a firm's website?
Requirements depend on what your firm is registered to do, so check current institute guidance directly. Common obligations include correct use of the Chartered Accountants description, audit registration wording with your register reference, licence wording for probate or investment business, a complaints route, and professional indemnity details under the Provision of Services Regulations.
How much does a website for a UK accountancy practice cost?
Anywhere from a few hundred pounds for a template you build yourself to five figures for a national firm. For a typical independent practice, a monthly plan between £189 and £329 covers the build, hosting, edits and ongoing search work together. Larger builds with integrations or bespoke portals are quoted individually.
Should an accountancy practice write blog posts?
Only ones that answer a question a client has actually asked you twice. Salary versus dividends, which MTD software to use, what a landlord can still deduct, when to incorporate. One well researched piece a quarter with a visible date beats monthly filler, and dated tax content that nobody updates is worse than publishing nothing.
What to fix before January
Open your own website and try to answer three questions as a stranger would. Who will handle my accounts, what will it cost, and how do I move to you. If any of the three takes more than one click or is not answered at all, that is the work, and it is mostly writing rather than design.
Then pick the one client type you want more of next year and give it a proper page, priced, written in that reader's language, with a named person on it. April 2027 brings the £30,000 MTD threshold and another cohort of landlords and sole traders looking for someone, and pages published in the autumn will be doing their job by then. Pages published in March will not.
We build and run sites for accountants, solicitors and advisers on one monthly plan with the search work included. If you want a straight opinion on whether your current site is a structure problem or a spend problem, send us the address and we will tell you.
