Accountants Have the 4th-Fastest Websites I Tested. They Still Finished Dead Last.

I owe accountants an apology.

For years I assumed the ones sitting on clunky old websites simply didn’t care about the internet. Numbers people, I figured, with spreadsheets and coffee and no patience whatsoever for any of this.

Then I actually tested them, and it turned out I had the whole thing backwards.

I counted 3,913 accounting firms across 24 cities this year, and their average speed score on a phone came back at 63 out of 100, against 58 for small business sites as a whole.

Only three industries beat them, and only barely: electricians, lawyers and plumbers, all at 64 out of 100.

Fourth out of 47 industries, on the single thing that every website article on the internet tells you to go and fix before anything else.

And they still finished last of all 47, with an overall score of 65, which means hair salons beat them, travel beat them, and so did every other business type I put through the same audit.

So what happened?

Speed was the part they got right

Let me be fair to the number before I use it. A 63 isn’t a good score, because Google files anything from 50 to 89 under “needs improvement”, and only 90 and up counts as good.

It’s still quicker than almost every other industry I put through the same audit. I’d have bet on the trades to beat them without thinking twice about it, and only two of them did.

So I can’t sit here and call accountants bad at the internet when they beat all but three of the 47 industries I ranked at the most technical part of it. They aren’t bad at it, they’re quiet about it, which is a completely different problem and a much cheaper one to solve.

Which raises an awkward question if you run a firm and you’ve already paid a developer to make your pages quicker. What exactly did you expect that money to do for you?

Electricians get sold that same job constantly, and I keep talking them out of the rebuild that chases a perfect speed score.

Nobody’s watching the door

Only 44.7% of the accounting sites I checked had any analytics on them at all, against 58% across everything I audited.

Analytics is the bit of code that tells you how many people showed up, where they came from, and which page sent them straight back to Google.

So more than half of those accounting websites are running blind. Do you know which half yours is in?

If it’s the blind half, then every decision you make about your own marketing is a guess wearing a suit, and you would never let a client hand you a year of guesses in October.

Sit with that a second. These are people who won’t let a client guess at their quarterly numbers, who will chase a rounding error back through three months of statements, and who charge real money for exactly that kind of attention.

Their own website, meanwhile, is a sealed box that nobody in the office has ever opened.

Every time I’ve asked an accountant how many people visited the site last month, I’ve watched them reach for a number that isn’t there. Push a little further and ask how many of those visitors turned into a phone call, and you’ll get a shrug and a change of subject.

Would you accept that answer from your own bookkeeper?

Quick to load, thin everywhere else

The picture changes the second I stop timing the page and start reading it.

Only 34.0% of accounting sites publish a blog, and just 50.1% link out to a single social profile, against 37% and 66% nationally.

Schema markup runs thin as well, at 56.7% against 70.5% nationally. Schema is the hidden code that spells out for a search engine what your business is, where it sits and what it does. Without it, your address, your hours and your services sit in the page as ordinary sentences instead of tagged facts.

Even the plain stuff drops off. Only 65.6% of their pages carry a meta description, where the national number is 77.9%. A meta description is the little gray line of text underneath your name in search results.

They’re not asleep everywhere, and I’d rather show you the parts they win. Almost every accounting page I checked has a title tag, 98.1% of them, and 31.8% put a contact form on the homepage, which is better than the 28% I get nationally.

But a quick page and a phone number is a business card, and they’re competing against firms that also brought something to read.

None of the missing pieces are design work, which is how I ended up with six unglamorous fixes for accounting firms out of the same audit.

Speed gets a stranger onto your page. What’s waiting on the page is what decides whether they stay on it.

What does your homepage tell that stranger that the firm two blocks over doesn’t?

The ones that never showed up at all

One number reframed all of this for me.

Only 68.0% of the accounting firms I counted have a website at all, second worst of any industry, with hair salons the only ones lower at 62.6%.

So a profession built on trust, credentials and repeat business has a very large minority of its firms offering a stranger nothing whatsoever to find.

If your firm is one of them, you’re betting the entire practice on a referral chain you can’t see into and can’t grow on purpose.

I know the reasoning, because I’ve heard it at barbecues. Referrals keep the lights on, the good clients arrive through other good clients, and a website is just a brochure that nobody reads anyway.

That logic holds right up until the afternoon a woman with a brand new consulting business needs a CPA (a certified public accountant, the license that lets someone sign off on your books) and does what she does with every other decision in her life. She searches for one.

You’re not slow in that search. You aren’t in it.

How many of those searches do you suppose ran in your town this month, and who ended up collecting them?

How many reviews do you have?

The review gap made me wince harder than anything else I found. Want to guess how many the average firm has collected?

Twenty-four Google reviews at 4.5 stars, while the average small business across my data holds 179 at 4.6. Only 72.1% of accountants have ever picked up a single review, against 88% across the whole file.

Almost the same rating. A fraction of the proof.

I pulled that gap apart on its own, because tax season already hands an accountant the easiest ask in the trade.

Your reviews are the one piece of your reputation a stranger can check before they ever pick up the phone, and a firm with a handful of them reads as brand new whether or not you’ve been filing returns for decades.

Reviews don’t need a developer, a rebuild or a single line of code, which is why I keep writing about how to actually ask for them. One link, one tap, every happy client you have, every single time.

You just saved someone a small fortune on their return and they think you walk on water. Did you remember to ask them?

What my data can’t tell you

Let me be straight about the limits, because I’d rather you trusted the parts that hold up.

I audited what’s on the site. I have no idea what’s in the bank.

A firm with no website might be booked solid through to March on referrals alone, quietly out-earning the competitor with the polished pages, and my data would never know the difference. It can’t see revenue, or client lists, or a phone that refuses to stop ringing.

It sees what a stranger with a search bar sees, and that’s all it sees.

Is that a fair way to judge a practice? Not entirely, no.

So read all of it as a map of what’s findable rather than a scoreboard of who’s winning, and judge your own firm against the first one. Those two things only start to overlap when the referrals dry up, and referrals do dry up eventually, through retirements and moves and a partner deciding to go it alone.

Pull the numbers yourself

I’d rather you didn’t take my word for a single line of this.

The report has an explorer where you pick one industry with no city, or one city with no industry, and it prints every rate with its own sample size beside it, right down to the 2,113 accounting sites I could audit.

Choose accountants and you’ll get the same rates I just quoted at you, along with how many websites each one came from. The rankings are mine, from lining all 47 industries up next to each other.

Poke at it and check my work. Where does your own trade land against the one down the street, or against the city you’ve been thinking about opening an office in?

Go and look at your own

Speed is table stakes, not a strategy, and accountants showed me that better than any industry I tested, because they beat almost everybody on the clock and still finished the whole thing in last place.

A site nobody finds, that says nothing and tracks nothing, still loses. It just loses quickly.

So do three things this week, and none of them need me.

1. Open your analytics. If you can’t find them, you don’t have them, and there’s your afternoon sorted.

2. Search your city and the word “accountant” on your phone in a private window, the way a stranger would. See where you land.

3. Ask your next three happy clients for a review, and don’t dress it up, just ask them.

Then come and tell me what you found, because I want to know whether your site turned out to be in that 44.7% or in the rest of them.

And if you’d rather hand the whole thing over to someone else, building websites for accountants is something I do. I just think you should know what you’re buying before you buy it, and it isn’t speed. You already have that one.