With a service the customer is not buying a product, they are buying trust
A product can be handled, a service cannot. The decision rests on whether they believe you, and the website is the first place that trust is won or lost. Most of the sites we measured carry no evidence of work delivered.
The person checking you out decides
Almost nobody arrives at a professional services site cold. They arrive after a referral, a meeting or a proposal, to confirm you are who you say you are. That is a different job from winning a new customer.
Checking has a short list of questions: who will do the work, who have they done it for, what does it cost and what happens if it goes wrong. A site that answers none of them does not confirm the referral, it undermines it.
What we measured in this industry
The sample holds 66 sites from this industry and 66 of them were measured. The median mobile performance is 63 against 61 for the whole sample. 60 of the 66 measured sites fall short of ninety points, the line Google calls a good result.
Zoom on a phone does not work on 17 of the 66 sites whose pages could be fetched. On 13 of those the setting is not missing, zooming is disabled on purpose.
23 sites in the industry run on WordPress and 16 of them carry at least one outdated plugin. An outdated plugin is the most common way a company website gets compromised.
A typical site from the industry
One real measured site from this industry, without a name, address or town. Not a cherry picked extreme: it is the one sitting exactly in the middle of the industry results.
- Mobile performance
- 63
- Time to main content
- 11.1 s
- Home page weight
- 1.8 MB
- Findings in the scan
- 2
The three faults we saw most often
Not true of every services site. True of most of the ones we measured.
Outdated plugins at firms trusted with client data
This industry has the highest share of sites with outdated plugins of all we measured. Yet accountants, lawyers and consultants tell clients their documents are safe with them. The website is the first place a client checks that claim for themselves.
Third party scripts nobody remembers
Leftovers from campaigns switched off long ago, unattended chat widgets and tracking from agencies that stopped working for the firm years back. Each one watches visitors, slows the site down and sends data somewhere.
Nowhere does it show who will do the work
Stock photos and sentences about a professional team. With a service, the name and face of the person who will run the job is the strongest proof a site can carry. It costs nothing and almost nobody has it.
Our work comes from referrals, we do not need a website
A referral does not end at the referral. It ends with the person looking you up before they pick up the phone. The site does not decide whether they hear about you, it decides whether the referral holds.
That makes it cheaper than it looks: this is not about winning new customers, it is about not losing the ones somebody sent you for free.
What pays off in services
Features from our catalogue that evidence what cannot be handled. The ones with a live demo can be tried out.
Want to know how your site stands against the industry?
Measure your own siteFrequently asked questions
Should service prices be published on the site?
At least a range. A customer who cannot find a price will estimate one anyway, usually badly and usually higher. A range also filters out enquiries that would waste both sides' time.
How long does a services website take?
Typically six to ten weeks, and the longest part is not the pages but the material: case studies, photos of people and pricing. Where that is ready, it moves considerably faster.
Will case studies expose sensitive client details?
They need not. A case study works without the client's name: industry, size, brief and result. We work with consent, and where a client withholds it the reference goes out anonymously or not at all.