There are two versions of this complaint and they have different causes.
The first: “We’ve had the site five years and it has never produced a single enquiry.” The second, more frustrating: “It produces enquiries, but they’re rubbish — people with three thousand pounds asking about pensions, or borrowers no lender will touch.”
Both are usually treated as marketing problems. They are almost always structural problems, and the distinction matters because marketing spend on top of a broken structure simply buys you more of the same disappointment.
Most adviser websites are brochures. They were commissioned to exist — because a firm needs a website — rather than to perform a job. You can identify a brochure site quickly. It has an “About Us” page describing the firm’s values, a “Services” page listing every discipline the firm has ever touched, and a “Contact” page with a form. It does not, anywhere, tell a specific person that this firm is specifically for them.
Homepage traffic on a generic adviser site converts somewhere in the range of half a per cent to two per cent. Purpose-built pages aimed at a defined audience convert several times higher. The gap is not design quality. It is specificity.
There is also a mechanical failure worth checking before anything else: a startling number of adviser contact forms no longer deliver. Hosting migrations, expired plugin licences, changed mailboxes and spam filtering silently break the one thing the site was supposed to do. If you have not tested your own enquiry form from an outside email address this quarter, do it before reading further.
Poor-quality enquiries are not bad luck. They are the predictable output of a website that describes services rather than clients.
A page headed “Pension Advice” attracts anyone with a pension — including the twenty-eight year old with a £4,000 pot from a first job. A page headed “Retirement planning for professionals and business owners within ten years of retirement, typically with £250,000 or more invested” attracts far fewer people and almost all of them are viable. The second page will produce a lower enquiry count and a dramatically higher conversion rate, and it will save you the hours currently spent politely declining people you cannot economically serve.
The same logic applies to mortgage broking. “Mortgage advice” pulls in first-time buyers with adverse credit, expat borrowers, complex self-employed cases and buy-to-let portfolio landlords indiscriminately. Naming the cases you want — and quietly implying the ones you do not — is the cheapest lead qualification available.
Most independent firms resist this. It feels like turning away business. In practice you are not turning it away; you are declining to spend your website’s attention on it.
Search visibility for adviser terms has become genuinely competitive, and it has also changed shape. Roughly three in ten UK search journeys now involve an AI layer of some kind, and a meaningful minority of adults have asked an AI assistant a financial question. Those systems synthesise answers from pages they can read, parse and trust. A site built on an ageing template, slow on mobile, with thin service pages and no structured information about the firm, is invisible to both classic search and the newer layer sitting on top of it.
Speed is not a vanity metric here either. Each additional second of load time correlates with roughly a seven per cent drop in conversion, and around seven in ten UK visits arrive on a phone.
Financial advice is a high-anxiety purchase. Visitors are scanning for reasons to stop. Common stopping signals on adviser sites: no named individuals, no photographs of actual staff, no FCA reference number or firm registration details visible, no address, testimonials with initials only, a copyright date several years old, and a blog whose last entry predates the pandemic.
Each is small. Collectively they say this firm may not still be operating properly, and a cautious visitor with money to protect will act on that impression without ever articulating it.
Before spending anything on a rebuild, answer these honestly:
1. If a stranger landed on your homepage, could they say in one sentence who your firm is for? If not, you have a specificity problem, and no amount of design will fix it.
2. Can you name the single action you want a visitor to take, and is it visible without scrolling on a phone? If there are five equally-weighted options, there is effectively none.
3. Does anything on the site prove the firm is currently active and currently staffed by the people named? Dates, recent posts, current photographs, live review feeds.
A site that fails all three has not underperformed. It was never asked to perform.
The reason firms tolerate a non-performing website for years is that the last rebuild was expensive, disruptive and produced this. Understandably, nobody is keen to repeat the experience on a promise.
Heer Digital works differently. We build a working homepage prototype at no cost and no obligation for independent IFAs and mortgage brokers — a real page you can click through, positioned for your actual client type, so the comparison with your current homepage is concrete rather than theoretical. There is no proposal to sign before you see it.
If the prototype earns its place, the build scales to the firm: a fast, low-cost single-page site with no content management system for a practice that rarely publishes, or a conversion of the same design into WordPress where you need to add pages, articles and adviser profiles yourself.
A website that produced nothing is not evidence that websites do not work. It is evidence that yours was never built to.
Contact Heer Digital to see a no-cost homepage prototype for your firm
