From January through April, your website does a lot of quiet work. New clients look you up after a referral. Returning clients search for your portal login, your document checklist or your hours. If any of that is out of date, the phone rings with questions your site should have answered, during the weeks you have the least time to take them.
Almost everything on this list can be handled now, in the calmer stretch before year-end. We look after websites for accounting firms and bookkeepers in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, and this is the checklist we'd work through with any firm before the season. None of it requires a redesign.
1. Update hours, availability and how to reach you
Many firms change their hours in tax season, adding evenings or Saturdays, or switching to appointments only. Whatever you decide, put it in one clear place on your site, and make sure it matches everywhere else it appears: the footer, the contact page and your Google Business Profile.
Also decide what you'll say about new clients. If you're closing intake for the season or keeping a waitlist, say so plainly. It saves a lot of polite rejection emails.
2. Check every client portal, upload and payment link
This is the most important item. In tax season, clients mostly visit your site to find the portal, upload documents or pay an invoice. Links break more often than you'd think: a provider changes its login address, you switch tools, or a button still points to a service you dropped last year.
Click every one of these links yourself, on a phone as well as a computer:
- Client portal login
- Secure document upload
- Online payment or invoice link
- Scheduling or booking link
Your website should send clients to the secure tools your firm already uses. It shouldn't encourage anyone to send tax documents through a general contact form or regular email. If your contact page invites people to "send us your documents," change the wording so it points to your portal instead.
3. Refresh your document checklist and FAQ
A "what to bring" or "what to upload" checklist is one of the most useful pages an accounting site can have, as long as it's current. Go through it line by line and update anything that changed in how you work: new forms you ask for, a new upload process, or a different way of booking a review meeting.
Do the same with your FAQ. Turnaround times, late documents and how you communicate during the season are worth answering once on your site rather than dozens of times by phone. Leave tax-law specifics for client conversations; your website doesn't need to be a tax guide.
4. Make sure your services and pricing pages match what you sell
Firms change over a year. Maybe you added payroll or advisory work, or stopped offering something. Bookkeepers often adjust monthly packages or add catch-up and cleanup work before tax season. If your services page still describes last year's firm, the right clients have a harder time finding you.
If you list prices or starting rates, check them now. Old prices on a website cause awkward conversations at exactly the wrong time.
5. Update your team page and credentials
New staff, seasonal preparers, a partner who retired, a new phone extension: these all belong on your team or about page. Check credentials too. If someone earned a CPA license, an EA designation, or a QuickBooks or Xero certification this year, add it. If a badge or certification has lapsed, take it down. Referral partners notice a stale team page.
6. Test your contact and intake forms
A contact form that silently stops sending email is an easy problem to miss. The form looks fine, the visitor clicks submit, and the message goes nowhere, or to an inbox nobody checks.
Send a test message through every form on your site and confirm it arrives where you expect. Do this now, and again in early January. If your firm changed email addresses or staff this year, check that forms aren't still sending to someone who has left.
7. Check the basics: speed, mobile and security
Many clients will open your site on a phone, often while hunting for the portal link. Load your main pages on your own phone and check that they appear quickly and the buttons are easy to tap.
Then make sure the technical basics are in order. Your site should load over HTTPS without a browser warning. If you're on WordPress, core, plugin and theme updates should be current, ideally tested before they go live, with a recent backup in place first. On Squarespace, Wix or Shopify, the platform handles its own software updates, but your content, forms and links still need checking.
Finally, make sure someone will notice if the site goes down, so you aren't the last to hear about an outage in March.
8. Plan how changes will happen once the season starts
Something will need changing mid-season: a closure, a revised deadline note, a new staff member. Decide now who makes those edits. If the answer is "whoever has a spare moment," it probably won't happen until May.
How we help accounting firms and bookkeepers
Our website care for accountants and CPA firms and website care for bookkeepers are built around this kind of routine. You email us the change, we make it, test it and report back. Every plan includes uptime monitoring, a monthly security scan, backups and tested updates, and a plain-English monthly report.
Pre-season prep usually means several small edits in a short window: hours, links, checklists, team updates. Basic ($49/mo) includes 1 small edit per month, Growth ($99/mo) up to 4, and Pro ($149/mo) up to 10, handled one request at a time. A small edit is a change that takes about 30 minutes or less. New pages are $99 each. Plans are month-to-month, and upgrades take effect right away (prorated), so you can move up a plan for the busy months; downgrades take effect at your next billing cycle. See the full details on our pricing page.
If your site is too dated to fix with a few edits, we also design and build websites for Los Angeles small businesses. A Starter site (1–5 pages) is $349, or $0 with any 12-month plan, and a Business site (6–10 pages) is $849, or $0 with a 12-month Growth or Pro plan. A build usually takes 2–3 weeks after we receive your content, so there's still time before the new year if you start soon. Either way, you own your site, domain and accounts.
Get a free website review before the season starts
Not sure where your site stands? Send us your URL for a free website review. We'll look at speed, mobile, outdated content, broken links and forms, security and search basics, then tell you in plain English what we'd fix first. It's free, there's no obligation, and no sales call is required.
Based in Beverly Hills, CA, we work with accountants, bookkeepers and other small businesses across Los Angeles, and with remote clients anywhere.