How to Choose a Financial Advisor Website Company: 12 Evaluation Criteria

This decision commonly gets made after a 30-minute demo call and a proposal that looks impressive. That's not enough information to make a good call on something that will represent your firm for the next three to five years.

Here are the 12 questions worth asking before you commit. Some of them you ask the vendor. Some of them you find out by looking at what they've already built.

1. What does their work actually look like?

Ask for five to ten live advisor sites they built in the past 12 months. Not portfolio screenshots: live URLs. Visit them. See whether they load fast, whether the messaging is specific, whether the conversion architecture is doing any work.

If they can't produce five live examples from the past year, they're either not doing much volume or they'd rather you not look closely.

2. What's the typical PageSpeed score?

Run three of their live client sites through Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev). The score that matters is mobile. Industry standard for financial services is 60–75. A well-built site on a modern platform should score above 80.

Why it matters: PageSpeed affects both user experience and organic search. A slow site sends warm traffic away before they read the headline.

If the vendor says PageSpeed doesn't matter, ask them to explain why Google's ranking algorithm disagrees.

3. What platform do they build on?

This is a maintenance and longevity question. If they build on WordPress, who manages security updates, plugin conflicts, and theme breakages? If it's a proprietary platform, what happens to your site if they shut down or get acquired?

Webflow and purpose-built SaaS platforms are both reasonable answers. Custom WordPress installations are often a long-term liability. Proprietary CMS platforms carry platform risk.

Ask who owns the site files and what it costs to migrate if you leave.

4. Do they understand the SEC Marketing Rule?

Not "have they heard of it": do they understand how it applies to testimonials, performance data, and third-party rankings on an advisory website?

Specifically: can they explain what required disclosures need to appear next to a client testimonial? Can they tell you why a "top advisor" badge from a magazine requires specific disclosure language?

If their answer is "you'll need to run that by your compliance officer," they're outsourcing compliance responsibility to you. That's fine, but it means you'll be doing that work on every piece of content they produce.

5. What does the CMS experience look like?

You'll need to update your site. Copy changes. New team members. Compliance-triggered edits. What does that process look like in practice?

Ask for a walkthrough of the CMS. Is it something your assistant can use in 20 minutes? Or does every change require a support ticket?

The platforms that lock you into a support queue for basic text changes are a hidden ongoing cost.

6. What does delivery actually look like?

"We'll build your site" is not a timeline. Ask for a specific delivery commitment in writing. What are the milestones? What happens if they miss them? What do they need from you to hit the date?

Some agencies have backlogs that push launch dates out 3–6 months. Ask specifically: what is the current timeline from signed contract to live site?

7. What's the revision process?

Design and copy revisions are inevitable. How many rounds are included? What triggers a change order? Ask for a previous client example of what the revision process looked like in practice.

The firms that bill hourly for every change request will cost significantly more than the upfront quote suggests.

8. What's included in the price?

Get a specific itemized scope. Copywriting or not? Photography direction or not? Analytics setup or not? SEO configuration or not?

A $5,000 quote that doesn't include copywriting is actually a $5,000 quote plus $3,000–$6,000 in copywriting. Know what you're comparing.

Specifically ask: is GA4 setup included? Google Search Console? Schema markup? These are table stakes for an effective site, and they're often listed as add-ons.

9. Who writes the copy?

This is the most consequential question on the list. Most of the visual and technical decisions on your site will be more or less fine. Copy is where the conversion work actually happens.

Ask: who writes the copy? What's their background? Can you see examples of the copy they've written for other advisors?

"We work with you to develop the copy" often means they'll send you a questionnaire and turn your answers into the copy, which means the output quality is limited by how well you can articulate your positioning in a form field.

Ask whether they have someone who understands how advisors position themselves against the big wirehouses and why an HNW prospect reads an advisor bio differently than an asset manager would.

10. What does the ongoing relationship look like?

After the site launches, what's the relationship? If you need a new page in six months, who do you call? What does it cost? Is there a retainer option?

The firms that disappear after launch create a different kind of problem than the ones with a monthly retainer. Know which one you're buying.

11. Do they have advisor-specific SEO knowledge?

A generalist SEO firm can hurt you on an advisor site. Keywords like "best financial advisor" are dominated by aggregators (SmartAsset, NerdWallet, Barron's). An advisor site needs to compete on local, niche, and long-tail terms where competition is winnable.

Ask: what keywords would you target for a fee-only advisor in my market? What's the rationale? Can you show a client example where organic traffic grew meaningfully?

Vague answers about "content strategy" and "link building" are not a strategy.

12. What's the realistic outcome expectation?

The firms worth working with will tell you what a realistic SEO and lead gen timeline looks like. Organic traffic takes 6–12 months to build meaningfully. Paid traffic can convert faster but costs more. A new site is not a marketing plan.

If the vendor implies your site alone will generate a predictable volume of new AUM within 90 days, that's a yellow flag. If they can't articulate how the site fits into a broader marketing picture at all, that's also a yellow flag.

The ones who know what they're doing will give you honest numbers and tell you what you'll need to invest beyond the site itself.

The short version

Pick a company that has live examples you respect, can write copy that sounds like it was written for your specific client, builds on a platform you can actually use, and gives you a specific delivery commitment in writing.

Everything else is secondary to those four things.