Your website is a credibility document before it is a marketing asset.
A prospective client decides whether to take you seriously long before they call, and a generic template quietly costs you the work. Glide builds accountancy practices a site that earns trust on sight, explains each service in plain English, and is written to the advertising rules you are held to. One monthly retainer from £1,000 plus VAT, no five-figure upfront build.
Nobody picks an accountant from a website. Plenty rule one out from it.
That asymmetry is the whole argument. A business owner choosing a practice is handing over their numbers, their deadlines and a fair amount of anxiety. They are not comparing feature lists. They are looking for a reason to believe you, and failing that, a reason to move on.
Most practice websites give them the second one. Stock imagery that appears on nine other firms in the same county. A services page that lists compliance work in the language of the legislation rather than the language of the client. A fee page that either says nothing or says "from £99", which attracts exactly the client you did not want.
The fix is not a redesign. It is deciding what you want to be chosen for, then building a site that says it clearly enough to be believed.
What an accountancy build includes
Aireside Accounting
Aireside is an independent UK practice doing limited company accounts, self-assessment, bookkeeping, payroll and tax planning for owner-managed businesses. The brief was not "make it look nicer". It was that the site had to make a stranger trust them before a conversation happened.
What that meant in practice: a calm palette and considered typography instead of accountancy stock imagery, a page per core service written so a business owner knows exactly what they are getting, and an enquiry path with no pop-ups and no pressure, because pressure is the opposite of the thing the page is trying to establish.
Dawn left an unprompted five-star review afterwards. That is the only review claim we make about the work. We do not hold their analytics, so we are not going to invent a traffic or lead figure for a page about honest marketing.
Read the Aireside case studyAn unprompted five-star review after we built their website.
“Great experience with Glide, super knowledgeable, engaging, and next level at problem solving! An absolute pleasure to work with and I'd happily recommend them to anyone.”
Aireside Accounting · Accountancy practice
Read the case studyThe bit a general web designer will not know
Your website is regulated advertising. The CAP Code sets the floor, and your professional body adds its own restrictions on top. Three that catch practices out:
Superiority claims
ICAEW, ACCA and AAT all restrict comparative and superiority claims. "The leading practice in the region" is the kind of line a designer writes without thinking and your professional body would rather you did not.
Reviews shown selectively
Filtering a review feed so the negative ones do not appear, or giving the positive ones greater prominence, is named in the CAP Code as publishing reviews in a misleading way. Incentivised reviews have to be declared as such.
Services outside your licence
AAT licences are tiered. A site that advertises a service the practice is not licensed for is a problem the web designer created and the practice owns.
None of this is legal advice and we are not your compliance function. It is the standard we write to, so what goes live is designed to pass rather than be walked back later.
The Glide Retainer, from £1,000/mo
One monthly retainer covers the website, hosting, maintenance, the search and AI-search foundations and the compliance-aware marketing. From £1,000 a month plus VAT, with no five-figure upfront bill.
See pricingAccountancy websites, answered
Weeks, not quarters. The people writing the code make the decisions, so there is no round-robin approval chain. The part that usually sets the pace is you: we need your service list, your fee approach and a decision on what you want to be known for. Practices that have those ready go live fastest.
No. Writing it is the job. You will be asked questions about how your practice works, which is different from being handed a blank document and a deadline. You review and correct what comes back rather than drafting from nothing.
Often you should not, and we will say so. The template providers are cheap and they work. The case for a custom build is when you want to be chosen for a reason other than price: a niche, a sector, a way of working. A template that four hundred other practices also use cannot carry that, because the thing that makes you different is the thing the template removed.
More than most practices expect. Your website is regulated advertising under the CAP Code, and your professional body adds its own line on top: ICAEW, ACCA and AAT all restrict comparative and superiority claims, and AAT also limits holding yourself out for services outside your licence tier. That is why claims like "the best accountants in the county" are a problem rather than a flourish.
There is no legal duty to. The Money Laundering Regulations put publication powers on the supervisor, not on you, and there is no requirement in the CCAB anti-money laundering guidance for firms to display it. Plenty of practices carry it anyway and it reads as a trust signal, so we usually keep it. Worth knowing it is a choice rather than an obligation, because a lot of firms have been told otherwise.
While you are subscribed the site is live, hosted, maintained and improved. If you want to take the build outright and host it elsewhere, there is a one-off buyout figure agreed in writing before you start. Nothing is hidden until you try to leave.
Websites for other regulated sectors
The same build discipline, written for the rulebook each sector is held to.
Websites for financial services firms
Built so the compliance step happens while the page is written rather than a week before launch, when changing it costs a rebuild.
Websites for mortgage brokers
Written for the person at your network who has to approve it, so it clears sign-off first time instead of coming back marked up.
Want the ranking side rather than the build? SEO for accountancy practices covers how practices get found. For the whole retainer, see marketing for accountancy firms.
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