From financial education to mortgage advice, without starting over

At the start the problem was simple: there was a growing following on social media, but nothing online that lived up to it. The existing site had been made with a site builder, hardly showed up in search, had no tools at all to show the expertise, and no way for a visitor to become a client. One month, about two thousand euros.

Half a year later came the more interesting problem: the licence took effect. Suddenly the firm was allowed to do something new, mortgages, and the entire site was still about something else. Services, prices, frequently asked questions, the layout of the homepage: everything had been built around an offer that was no longer the main one. And that is not something you can do halfway; a licensed adviser whose site still says otherwise is a problem.

Free tools to earn trust. Five calculators (building wealth, box 3 wealth tax, saving for a first home, cutting back on work early and, since the switch, the monthly mortgage payment) let a visitor experience the quality of the advice before paying anything. For four of them the result can be taken away as a PDF. In financial advice, that convinces people more than any sales copy.

An editor built into the site, from day one. The owner manages all content without me. That was the set-up from the first delivery, and it is exactly why the switch half a year later did not turn into a rebuild.

For the switch: first look at where demand already existed. The search data showed that people from Hoogeveen and the surrounding villages were already searching for mortgage advice in their own town, and kept landing on the homepage, which said nothing about it. They got their own pages, for thirteen towns and eight situations such as refinancing, renovating and making a home more energy-efficient, with one hard rule: a town page only exists once there is real, published content for it. Otherwise you are building doorway pages that help nobody.

Three systems out. The booking system, the payment system and the customer system have all been removed; appointments, payments and invoices now run through the mortgage platform the practice works on. Removing the payment integration alone took out more than 8,000 lines of code. The site now does what it does best: get found and start conversations.

The first delivery came within the month and within budget. Growth in search visibility was large, more than twentyfold, but that figure needs context: the starting point was a site-builder page with almost no authority, and growing from close to zero goes fast. What is there now does hold up: full indexing, structured data and local pages that rank for their own search terms.

The result I value most is the second one: when the business changed, the site did not have to be rebuilt. Turning the education platform into a mortgage platform took four weeks, while the foundation (the editor, the calculators, the content hub) simply stayed in place. The educational content was not thrown away but given a supporting role, and has fed the mortgage pages with background articles ever since.

On speed: the time the homepage did not respond to input went from 320 to 24 milliseconds, a 92% improvement. At 4.8 seconds, the load time of the largest element is still above the standard we hold ourselves to; that is still open and being tracked.