You can audit an advisor's homepage in about ninety seconds and tell whether the firm has thought about the prospect or just thought about themselves. Most haven't. Here are the five mistakes that come up over and over, and the fixes that close the gap.

1. The headline that says nothing

"Holistic Wealth Management for Life's Journey." "Strategic Solutions, Tailored to You." "Building Wealth, Preserving Legacies." These headlines could appear on any of fifteen thousand advisor websites without changing meaning.

The fix: Write a headline that names your audience or your point of view. "Wealth planning for surgeons in the first ten years of practice." "We don't sell insurance, annuities, or anything else with a commission attached." Specific beats clever, every time.

2. Stock photography

The smiling family on the dock. The hand on the chess piece. The aerial shot of a coastal estate at sunset. These photos are signaling "I bought a Getty subscription" — not "this is what working with us looks like."

The fix: Either invest in real photography (your office, your conference room, your team at work) or remove photography from the hero entirely. A pure typographic hero converts better than a generic stock photo. The vacuum is better than the filler.

3. The "About" page that's a wall of credentials

Three certifications, four professional memberships, two volunteer affiliations. A photo where you're standing in front of a bookshelf. None of which tell a prospect why you started this firm or who you're built for.

The fix: Replace the credential wall with a real founder story. Six paragraphs. What you did before. What made you start the practice. Who you wanted to serve. The credentials live in a sidebar, where they belong — as evidence, not as the argument.

4. Buried contact information

A "Contact Us" link in the top right that leads to a form. The form has eight fields. You hit submit, get a CRM auto-reply, and wait. Maybe Tuesday someone gets back to you.

The fix: Put a real next step in the hero. "Book a fifteen-minute discovery call" with an embedded scheduler. Same day. Frictionless. The advisors who do this convert three to four times as many homepage visits into actual conversations.

5. The team page nobody updated

Headshots from 2019. Two people on the team page who've since left the firm. The newest hire isn't on there yet. Your office address is wrong because you moved last summer. The disclosure footer references a regulatory cycle that ended two years ago.

The fix: Put one person in charge of a quarterly site audit. Two hours per quarter. Updated photos, current team, correct address, current disclosures. The cost of a stale site is the prospect who notices and wonders what else is stale about the firm.

The pattern

Each of these mistakes is signal. Each one is something a prospect picks up in the first thirty seconds and uses to decide whether to keep going. None of them cost much to fix. All of them are leaking trust right now.

You don't need to rebuild the website to address them. Pick one this week. Pick the next one next week. Watch what happens to your discovery call rate.