Web design for accountants
We crawled every accountancy practice website in Ireland we could reach. 15% of the sites listed on Google profiles did not load at all.
Of the ones that did, most were built to be looked at rather than to win the client: no way to call from a phone, no way to book, no idea what anything costs. A practice website has three jobs — be found, be trusted, be easy to act on. Here is what that means in practice, and what the profession currently gets wrong.
See how your website comparesFree · a plain look at where you stand · no pitch unless you ask.
The average practice website is a brochure that nobody can act on
Measured across the live accountancy practice websites in our Irish census. Denominators differ by check because not every site could be tested for every measure — they are printed on each.
The prospect has to phone during office hours, which is exactly when they are also at work.
While 61.1% of what Google is asked about accountants is a cost question.
On a phone the number has to be copied out by hand. Most people simply do not.
The link is on the Google profile, the prospect clicks it, and nothing happens.
The cheapest possible signal that a firm may no longer be paying attention.
Analytics or a Meta pixel firing before consent. A GDPR problem, not a design one.
Source: the Irish Accountancy Visibility Report 2026 — 2,775 practices, 122 towns, collected 29 July 2026. Figures describe the Irish market; we work across Ireland and the UK. Methodology.
What a practice website is actually for
It is not a brochure and it is not a portfolio. For an accountancy firm the site does three things: it gets found, it makes a stranger trust you, and it makes acting easy. Everything else is decoration.
It filters as much as it sells
A good practice site turns away the sole trader looking for the cheapest possible return and reassures the limited company that wants an adviser. Being specific about who you are for costs you enquiries you did not want.
The visitor is usually mid-comparison
They have three tabs open, all accountants, all saying they are proactive and friendly. The site that names its clients, its prices and its process wins on the strength of being concrete.
It has to work at eleven at night
Business owners look for an accountant after work. If the only route in is a phone number that rings an empty office, the enquiry goes to whoever offered a form or a booking link.
The first eight seconds decide the rest
Before anyone reads a word of your service list they have decided whether this looks like a firm that has its act together.
Say what you do and who for, immediately
“Chartered accountants in Kilkenny for owner-managed businesses” outperforms any tagline about partnership and growth, because it answers the only two questions the visitor has.
Show the people
Accountancy is bought on trust and delivered by named individuals. Real photographs of the actual team beat stock images of handshakes by a distance, and cost nothing but an afternoon.
Put the credentials where they are seen
Chartered Accountants Ireland, ACCA, CPA Ireland, ICAEW, Revenue agent status, the software you are certified in. These are the trust signals your visitor is scanning for.
Make acting on it effortless
This is where the profession loses most of its traffic, and it is almost entirely mechanical.
Click-to-call, on every page
60% of live practice sites have no click-to-call link (n = 1,582). On mobile that single tag is the difference between a call and a closed tab.
Online booking
96.6% offer none (n = 1,582). A calendar link that lets someone take a twenty-minute slot on Thursday removes the entire phone-tag stage from winning a client.
A form that asks the right things
Name, email, what they need, roughly what size the business is. Enough to qualify, short enough to finish. Every extra field costs completions.
Publish a price
92.7% publish nothing (n = 1,582). A from-price and the things that change it filters out the bargain hunters and wins the searchers who are asking the cost question anyway.
Built so it can rank, not retrofitted later
A website that cannot be found is an expensive business card. The structural decisions that decide whether you can rank are made during the build.
A page per service and per place
The site structure is the SEO strategy. One page per service, one per town you serve, linked to each other — decided at wireframe stage, not bolted on afterwards.
Titles that name the work and the town
74.8% of live practice sites leave the town out of the homepage title (n = 1,582). It is one line of text and it is the strongest on-page local signal there is.
Markup from day one
60.4% publish no LocalBusiness markup and 95.6% no AccountingService markup. Adding it at build time costs nothing; retrofitting it means touching every template.
Fast, on a phone, on Irish broadband
Performance is a conversion problem before it is a ranking problem. The visitor does not know why the site feels slow; they just leave.
Mobile first, genuinely
13% of live practice sites have no mobile viewport set at all (n = 1,582). Most searches for an accountant happen on a phone, and Google indexes the mobile version first.
HTTPS, still not universal
16.7% have no HTTPS. Browsers mark those sites as “not secure” — an unhelpful label for someone about to hand over financial details.
Weight is a choice
Most of what slows a practice site is uncompressed photography, a carousel nobody asked for, and four tracking scripts. All optional.
The European Accessibility Act is not optional
Since June 2025 the EAA has applied to services provided to consumers across the EU, Ireland included. Accessibility is now a compliance question as well as a decency one — and it is one your clients may start asking about.
Keyboard and screen-reader basics
80.8% of practice sites have no skip-to-content link and 13.5% do not declare a page language (n = 1,530). Both are single lines of markup.
Forms that can be filled in without sight
52.9% have at least one form field with no accessible name (n = 770). Counting placeholder text as a label — the most generous possible reading — it is still 27.9%.
Images that describe themselves
25.8% of sites have one or more images with no alt text. Median coverage across the profession is actually high; the failures are concentrated in a minority of sites.
Cookies, consent and the things your DPO would ask
An accountancy firm holds more sensitive client data than almost any other small business. A website that is careless about data is a bad look before it is a legal problem.
Trackers firing before consent
40.3% of live practice sites load trackers with no consent platform detected, and only 21.4% have one (n = 1,582). Google Analytics accounted for the large majority of the trackers we found.
Security headers
51.6% have none of the five basic security headers set, 91% have no Content-Security-Policy and 69.2% no HSTS. Cheap to add, awkward to explain the absence of.
Say what you keep and why
A privacy notice written for an accountancy practice — what the enquiry form stores, how long, who sees it — rather than a generic template with someone else's business name still in it.
It should still be yours next year
The part nobody asks about until the relationship ends, at which point it is the only part that matters.
You own the domain and the content
In your name, on your registrar account. A worrying number of small-business sites are held on an agency's account, which turns a change of supplier into a hostage negotiation.
You can edit it without ringing anyone
Changing a fee, adding a team member or publishing a deadline reminder should not require a support ticket. If it does, the site will go stale — which is how sites end up with a 2024 copyright.
It is maintained, not abandoned
40.3% of the practice sites where we could read a footer date showed 2024 or older (n = 697). A site is a thing you run, not a thing you buy.
Six weeks, and you are not doing the heavy lifting
The single biggest cause of a stalled website project is waiting on the client for content. We write the first draft and you correct it, which is a far smaller job than starting from a blank page.
What you actually sell
Services, the clients you want more of, the ones you would rather not repeat, your fees and what moves them. One conversation, not a questionnaire.
Structure and words
Sitemap built around the services and places you want to rank for, first-draft copy written for you to correct rather than compose.
Design and build
Designed, built, made fast, made accessible, markup and analytics in, consent banner configured properly.
Live and measured
Launched with redirects mapped from the old site, Search Console connected, and a baseline recorded so later claims are checkable.
The questions accountants ask
The honest answers, including where we are not a fit.
See how your site compares
We run your website through the same checks we ran across the census — speed, mobile, accessibility, consent, conversion paths, and whether it can be found at all — and send you the result with the three things worth fixing first. Do them yourself if you would rather.
Get your Visibility ReportFree · about 30 minutes · no pitch unless you ask.