Website Design for Accounting Firms: A CPA Site That Wins Business Clients and Serves the Ones You Have

Six jobs an accounting firm's site does between partner meetings

A firm website is not a brochure, though many still read like one. It works two shifts: selling to owners who have never met you and serving clients who already pay you. Both shifts fail quietly when the site is built for neither.

Pages and features a CPA firm website needs

Firms with a single niche can launch with fewer pages; firms with three offices and five service lines need all of them. The guide to what a business site should include covers the basics every site shares.

Client files deserve better than email attachments

Tax and accounting firms count as financial institutions under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. In an August 18, 2026 release (IR-2026-92), the IRS and its Security Summit partners reminded tax and accounting professionals that they must have a written information security plan, and pointed to Publication 5708 for a template. The website is not the whole plan, but it is often where documents first change hands, and it should make the safe route the easy one.

Most firms already pay for a client portal through their practice software. In that case the site's job is to make the portal impossible to miss, explain to clients how to use it, and keep the public site from collecting anything sensitive through a contact form. Firms that want their own secure upload, intake questionnaire or client dashboard need a site with a portal or web app, which starts at $3,500. Either way we keep sensitive data off the marketing pages, serve everything over HTTPS and limit who can see submissions.

Credentials, case studies and fees on the page

A CPA firm's website is advertising under the profession's rules, and some of the most persuasive pages are the ones most likely to break them. These are built into how we plan content.

• Licensed names and legal form. Texas 22 TAC 501.83 requires a firm to practice under the name in which it is licensed, with its legal form designation where required, and presumes names implying special expertise are misleading.
• The CPA title. AICPA 1.600.100 treats use of the CPA credential outside state rules as misleading; bios show licenses as the board records them.
• Designations. A firm may use an AICPA-awarded designation such as PFS on firm marketing only if all its partners hold it.
• Case studies and client logos. AICPA 1.700.001 requires specific client consent before disclosing confidential client information, and Texas requires testimonials to rest on verifiable facts.
• Fees. AICPA 1.600.010 calls a fee quote misleading when it was likely to rise substantially and the client was not told. A fee page explains what moves the number.
• IRS marks. The IRS seal and logo are not for outside use, however official they would make a tax page look.

Your managing partner or counsel approves the final wording; we build the pages so the required lines are part of the template, not something someone remembers to paste.

Quick to load, easy to read, open to every client

Owners check a firm on a phone between meetings, and older clients read fine print at large text sizes. Our sites run on Next.js, and each page leaves the server as finished HTML, text included, rather than an empty shell that scripts fill in later. Phones on weak signal get words sooner, and so do AI crawlers: Vercel's December 2024 analysis found OpenAI's and Anthropic's crawlers did not run JavaScript. To be fair, a carefully built WordPress site also sends HTML; the trouble usually starts with the plugins added afterward. Our Core Web Vitals service explains the speed side.

Accessibility is part of the build, not an add-on: strong contrast, a label on every form input, menus that work from a keyboard, and pages that hold together when a client zooms to 200%. Firms that want a formal review can add our ADA compliance service.

How the site helps a firm get named in search and AI answers

Search engines and AI assistants describe a firm from what the web says about it, and the website is the part you write. Niche pages answer niche questions; bios that match CPAverify and the state board make the firm easy to verify; AccountingService markup on location pages states plainly what kind of business this is. Google says no special markup is needed for its AI features, and it should always match the visible page. The engine side of the work, from license records to reviews, is on GEO for accounting firms, and bringing new clients to the finished site is accounting firm marketing.

Athena CMS when the marketing department is one partner

Athena CMS comes with each custom DataCram site. Staff change a bio or an office phone in a simple form, and the AI agents inside it only ever propose; a person publishes. That order of operations fits a firm in which no sentence goes public until a partner reads it.

• Prometheus finds questions clients ask that the site does not answer and drafts the page.
• Calliope drafts articles for each niche, ready for the responsible partner to edit.
• Delphi puts questions about the firm to ChatGPT, Google's AI answers and other engines each week, catches services or claims they get wrong, and proposes the facts and FAQs that would set them straight.
• Hestia makes sure every office's address, number and hours read the same on the site and on each listing, including the days around holidays.
• Iris handles the page titles, search descriptions, link previews and markup.

If WordPress is the alternative on the table, read how Athena compares with WordPress. After launch, our hosting and maintenance plans look after updates and uptime.

Price, financing, and when Squarespace will do

A new site or a rebuild for a firm is quoted once and does not move: the floor is $1,750. Add a portal or web app, a custom secure upload or a client dashboard, and the floor becomes $3,500; build online consultation booking in and the web design pricing page puts the project near $9,000. You can spread the cost at 0% after a 25% deposit, over as long as 12 months for any project, 24 months on projects of $15,000 or more, and 36 months at $20,000 or more. On a $9,000 site that works out to $2,250 at signing and twelve payments of $562.50.

Our comparisons with Squarespace and Wix go into the trade-offs.

Mockup to launch, scheduled around busy season

1. 1

   A home page on us

   Request a free mockup and our designers build a version of your firm's home page for you to keep, whatever you decide.

2. 2

   One number in writing

   The mockup, or a free site audit of the current site, leads to a single fixed price for the agreed scope, with or without a portal.

3. 3

   Content interviews

   Short sessions with the partner behind each niche, so the industry pages sound like the people who do the work.

4. 4

   Build and partner review

   We build on Next.js with Athena CMS; partners review every page and the required lines before launch.

5. 5

   Launch outside the crunch

   We schedule launch away from filing deadlines, keep URLs or redirect every one that changes, and connect analytics and listings.

Back to the website design by industry hub, or see how we build for the wider family on financial services website design, with GEO for financial services, financial services marketing and our professional services work. Tax offices have different needs, covered on tax preparer website design.