Challenge

The firm provided bookkeeping, payroll, VAT, and year-end accounts to roughly 200 SMEs in and around London. Their website dated from around 2010: it described services in accounting jargon, gave no sense of pricing or process, and had no secure way for clients to send receipts or bank statements. Sensitive documents were attached to unencrypted emails, there was no cookie consent or privacy notice, and the partners worried about both conversion and data-protection exposure.

Solution

We relaunched the site with plain-English service pages aimed at SME owners - bookkeeping, payroll, VAT, and tax returns, each explaining what happens, who handles it, and what the client needs to provide. Alongside the marketing site, we delivered a GDPR-compliant client portal with per-user login: clients upload documents, view outstanding tasks, and download completed returns, with role-based access so each business only sees its own files.

Technical Approach

The public site is statically generated behind a CMS, and every old URL was preserved through a documented redirect map to protect the firm's UK organic rankings. The portal sits behind an authenticated route with server-side session checks, documents are encrypted at rest, and a consent manager blocks analytics and marketing cookies until the visitor opts in. Form submissions and portal traffic run over enforced HTTPS.

Results

New-client inquiries rose by 40% within three months, with the plain-English service pages taking most of the credit. Within six weeks of launch, 75% of active SME clients had activated the portal and started uploading documents instead of emailing them, and the site passed its GDPR review with no open items. Mobile load time dropped from 4.2 seconds to 1.3 seconds.