Your Financial Firm Is Locked Tight and Hard to Find

You’re calm about your website. That’s the mood I keep meeting in financial offices, and I don’t think you’re wrong to be in it.

Nothing is broken. Nobody has complained. It loads, it looks like a firm that handles other people’s money, and someone signed off on every word of it two years ago.

When did you last open the thing on purpose?

So I’m not about to tell you your site is a disaster. It isn’t.

I’d rather tell you about two planning practices that had almost the same website and two completely different years.

Same locks, different phones

I looked at both of them last spring, about a month apart. Similar size, similar fees, both a decade or so old.

One was booked solid into the fall. The other had a partner spending his Thursdays ringing people who hadn’t asked to hear from him.

Different builders, different years, and on the first checks I run the two sites came back as twins.

I run the same checks in every market I audit, and on security the financial firms climb to the top and stay there.

97.1% of the financial websites I audited answer over a locked connection, where 94% of everything I check does.

Then the part almost nobody bothers with.

When a site gets its lock, the old unlocked address usually stays alive underneath it. Both versions still answer. Both still load.

Leave it that way and the lock only covers the people who arrived through the door you’re proud of. A client working off a card printed in 2016, or a link a colleague saved and forwarded, comes in the other way and never gets carried across.

Which of the two is printed on the business cards in your desk drawer?

93.8% of these firms carry her across anyway, against 88% of the sites I test nationally.

Both of my two did it. Both were quietly doing the thing that most of my clients have never heard of and wouldn’t recognize if I showed it to them.

In nearly every other trade I audit, that particular job rots. It needs a person to get into a hosting account nobody has opened since the build, work out what they are looking at, and then agree to never think about it again.

Financial firms do it because someone in the building is paid to worry about exactly that category of risk, and I’d take your compliance habits over almost any other industry on my list.

So the careful half was a tie. Whatever separated a full fall from a Thursday of cold calls was sitting somewhere else.

What a stranger found

I did what their buyers do. I typed both firm names into my own phone.

The busy one came back with a column of comments from people who’d actually used her, a few of them long and rambling in the way honest people ramble.

The quiet one came back with an address, a phone number and nothing underneath. A listing with the lights off.

Only 51.5% of the financial businesses in my sample carry so much as one Google review, where 88% of small businesses manage it.

Empty doesn’t read as new. It reads as a firm nobody has ever said anything about, which is a rotten thing to find when the subject is your savings.

Money won’t solve it either. I’ve told advisers to go ahead and sign the cheapest of their three quotes, because the check this trade finishes last on isn’t for sale on any of them.

If a stranger typed your firm’s name into her phone this evening, sitting in a parking lot with ten minutes to kill, how much would she actually learn about you before she gave up and called the other name on her list?

The quiet firm’s partner told me his clients were private people who would never discuss money in public, and he said it with the total confidence of a man who had never once asked one of them.

That’s probably accurate about some of them. It cannot possibly be accurate about all of them, and the only way to discover which is which is to ask, one at a time, in the week after you’ve done something a client is grateful for.

What did you check about the last person you trusted with real money?

The other thing they didn’t share

Then I opened both sites on my phone, standing outside on cellular, the way a customer meets them.

The busy one was up in a blink.

The quiet one gave me an empty gray field with a spinning circle in the corner.

Then a chart. Then a market ticker.

Then, eventually, a sentence telling me what the firm did for a living.

Financial sites average 51 out of 100 for mobile speed, where every small business I test averages 58. Google calls anything under 50 poor and won’t say good until 90, which leaves your whole trade parked in the middle band where nothing looks broken enough to fix.

Your trade doesn’t get slow by accident, though. It gets slow by approval.

A calculator someone’s brother-in-law recommended. A market feed. Three fact sheets.

A disclosure block on the bottom of every page. A chat widget from a vendor with a two year contract.

Every one of them arrived with a good reason and a signature beside it, and not one person in that room was picturing a woman on a train with two bars of signal.

Nothing ever comes back off, either, because removing an item means telling the colleague who requested it that his idea is now costing the firm business. That conversation is more uncomfortable than another second of waiting, so the waiting wins, every quarter, forever.

Taking things back off is most of what looking after a website actually involves, and no build quote has ever had a line for it.

Who at your firm is allowed to say no to a good idea?

Most of what I rebuild for financial firms starts by taking things off the page instead of adding them.

Before you tell me the numbers are wrong

I counted 3,709 of these businesses across 24 markets before I said any of this out loud, and opened 2,800 of their websites to mark them one at a time. If you’d sooner check me than believe me, open the explorer on my report, set the industry to financial services and touch nothing else. One dropdown, not two.

What appears is a card listing every check I ran with the count of sites it came from, and I had that card open beside me for most of this post.

On the code checks, your trade sits above the national line on nearly everything I run. Tags, structure, the security work, the lot.

Chiropractors carry the same shape, near the top on one column and near the bottom on another, and that split says plenty about who ends up owning the dull jobs.

So would you rather argue with my figures, or with the number of people who read your name this year and went somewhere else with it?

The two checks you’re losing are the two that nobody can install for you, and they’re why a trade this careful still finishes near the bottom of my report card.

One of them needs your clients to open their mouths. The other needs someone to keep saying no to good ideas, for years, long after the site went live.

Neither of those has a delivery date. Which is exactly why they’re the two still sitting there.

Who this isn’t for

None of this was written for the firm with a page of client comments and a homepage that appears before your thumb leaves the glass. You already did the hard half, so go and enjoy your Thursday.

I didn’t write it for the adviser whose book closed years ago either, the one who takes everything from two accountants he’s known since college. A stranger typing your name is not your problem, and a website can’t solve a problem you don’t have.

I wrote it for the partner making the calls. The one sitting behind the safest website on his street, wondering why nothing ever comes in on its own.

Is that your Thursday, or his?

You locked the door. Nobody’s knocking. Those were always two separate jobs, and only one of them came with the build.