Financial Firms Build It Right and Still Finish Near the Bottom

For about six years I told clients that if I fixed the website, the phone would follow.

I charged money for that sentence. I believed every word of it, and it made my job the whole job, which is a comfortable thing for a web designer to believe.

Financial firms talked me out of it, so consider this one addressed to you.

Nothing dramatic happened, either. No client fired me and taught me a lesson over a difficult lunch.

I sat down one winter and graded 47 industries against the same ten checks, and one of those rows refused to behave the way my favorite sentence said it should.

The grade doesn’t match the build

Financial services scores 67 out of 100, 45 of 47 among the industries I graded.

Read that and you’d picture a profession full of ugly sites thrown together in 2011 by a nephew over a long weekend.

Then you open one.

64.6% of these sites have analytics installed, where I only get 58% across the businesses I audit. Analytics reaches me as a single flag per site: is there code on this page recording who turned up and which pages they opened.

The rest of the build tells the same story, row after row. In better shape than plenty of trades I would have bet on to beat you.

I went through a run of them one Sunday expecting the usual wreckage and spent the whole afternoon being mildly impressed and increasingly confused.

So where exactly is a profession this careful throwing its points away?

You measure everything else

Your profession counts things for a living. You even paid to have the code installed that counts your own website.

You can tell me what a portfolio did against its benchmark over nine years, net of fees, and produce the document that proves it before I’ve finished asking the question.

So how many strangers typed your firm’s name into a phone last month?

I’ve asked dozens of advisers and I’ve had a real answer twice. Both times it came from the person’s spouse, who ran the marketing on a Wednesday afternoon and kept a notebook.

The one number nobody in your building reports on is the one deciding whether next year’s work walks in on its own or gets chased down the phone in the dark half of the year.

Nothing produces a statement for it, so it quietly stops existing. Every other part of the practice gets counted, compared and written down for a committee, and the part that decides who calls you next spring gets a shrug and an anecdote about referrals.

Two checks I used to read as one

Two of the phone checks sit side by side, and for years I read them as the same question asked twice.

The left one comes back as a word. Pass or fail, does the page work in a hand. 83.1% of financial sites come back a pass, against 78% of everything I test.

The right one comes back as a number, and it answers something the left one never asks. How long does the woman holding that hand wait before your page is any use to her at all?

For financial sites that number is 51 out of 100, against a national average of 58.

So the page is cut to the shape of a phone and still keeps her sitting there on one. An odd pair of results to hold at the same time, and an easy one to miss from a desk with a big monitor on it. I sat with two planning practices watching that wait happen, and the careful, locked down build was the thing making them slow.

How long does yours take, honestly, on a phone that has never opened it before, standing somewhere with ordinary signal? Not a guess. The real number.

Nobody at your firm has ever met your homepage the way she does. You meet it on office wifi, on a machine that has opened it four hundred times and kept a copy of every picture.

The checks nobody in your office has seen

The review checks reach me as two numbers per business, a count and a star average.

Financial firms come back with nothing to count more often than any trade I audit. 51.5% of these listings carry a review at all, next to 88% across every trade I count.

No builder can sell you that one, which is why the letter I wrote to an adviser choosing between three website quotes ends up somewhere none of the three quotes go.

So what does yours say tonight?

Why the grade lands where it does

Ten checks go into that grade, each carrying its own weight, and the heavy ones are not the ones a builder hands over.

Reviews carry fifteen points of the hundred. Speed carries another fifteen.

So your firm can get every line of code right, sign it all off, and still finish near the bottom of a report card, because the two checks that count for the most are the two that nobody quotes for and nobody reports on.

I settled those weights before I knew which trade would land where, so none of it was arranged to embarrass you. Those two carry the most because they’re the parts a customer actually lives through, and everything else on the list is scaffolding holding them up.

That was the part that changed my mind about my own work. A well-built site was never the finish line, and I’d been selling it as one for years.

What actually brings the work in

A referral still arrives the way it always did. Someone says your name at a table, and the person who heard it checks you on a phone that same evening, usually in a car, usually while half listening to something else.

Two things decide what happens next. Whether there’s anything written about you, and whether your page shows up before her attention wanders off.

Neither one is in your quarterly report. Neither one was itemized on your website quote. Consultants sit in the same spot, and the line that decides whether a stranger hires one of them was missing from all three of the quotes on her desk, mine included.

And how would you know either way?

Rebuilding sites for financial firms is a good part of my week now, and most of the value in that job isn’t the build. It’s the two hours afterward, working out who inside the practice owns the parts no supplier can finish. Keeping a website going is mostly those parts, month after month, long after the invoice for the build is paid.

Send me the page

Not the whole site. One page, the one a stranger lands on when she types your firm’s name into her phone.

Send the address over and I’ll go and look at it, outside, on cellular, and tell you what I saw and how long I stood there waiting for it.

I’ll look at your listing while I’m in there, and tell you what’s written on it. That’s either the easiest conversation the two of us will ever have or the one you’ve been putting off since 2019.

Either way you’ll finally have a number for it. A real one, taken from outside your office, about the side of your practice nobody in the building has ever counted.

Isn’t that your whole job?

You measure everything else in that building. Measure this one too.