Every January, a prospective client lands on an accounting firm’s tax-season page and reads last year’s dates. The extension note still references the prior filing year. The “Book your appointment” button opens a scheduling calendar that was retired in May. The document checklist mentions a form the firm stopped collecting two seasons ago, and the office hours at the bottom say the firm closes at 5:00 on Saturdays, which it has not done since the pandemic.
Clients notice. Most of them will not email you about it.
For a CPA or bookkeeping firm, that stale page carries more weight than it would for most small businesses. People are trusting you with their Social Security numbers, their income, and their deadlines. When the page that is supposed to tell them how to work with you this season is visibly out of date, it quietly raises a question you never want a client asking: if the website is a year behind, what else is? The usual response is to schedule a website overhaul, spin up a fresh “2027 Tax Season” page, or hand the problem to whoever has a spare afternoon in December. None of those fix the underlying issue, which is that the page was never built to be updated.
There is a better way to handle it, and it does not require a redesign every year. You build the tax-season page once, on a URL that never changes, and you separate the handful of details that change every season from everything that stays the same. Then the yearly refresh becomes a short checklist instead of a project.
What a Tax-Season Page Actually Needs to Do
Before deciding what to update, it helps to be clear about the job this page performs. A tax-season landing page is where a current client goes to find out how this year will work, and where a new client goes to decide whether to hire you. It usually gets more traffic in a few months than the rest of the site gets all year, and much of that traffic arrives with a specific task in mind.
For most firms, that means the page should cover a fairly predictable set of things:
- The tax preparation services you offer, and who they are for (individuals, sole proprietors, small businesses, trusts, and so on)
- How a new client gets started, including any engagement letter, intake questionnaire, or consultation step
- A “what to bring” or “what to upload” document checklist
- How to book an appointment or drop off documents
- How to send documents securely through your client portal
- Your seasonal office hours and any key internal cutoffs, such as the date you stop accepting new returns before the filing deadline
- What happens if a client needs an extension
- A clear next step, usually booking or contacting the office
Look at that list for a minute and you will notice something useful. Most of it does not change from year to year. Your services, your intake process, your general approach to extensions, the reasons someone should choose your firm, and the instructions for using the portal tend to stay stable for several seasons at a time. What changes is a short list of specifics: dates, hours, the tax year being referenced, the booking link, perhaps a new form on the checklist, and any fee or policy adjustments.
That distinction is the whole strategy. Once you see the page as a stable foundation with a few seasonal fields on top, you stop thinking of it as something that has to be rebuilt.
Build It Once on a URL That Never Changes
The most common mistake firms make is creating a new page every year. It feels tidy. There is a “2025 Tax Season” page, then a “2026 Tax Season” page, each with its own address, and the old ones either linger in the navigation or get deleted. The trouble is that every link to the old page breaks or points to outdated information. Clients bookmarked it. Your email signature links to it. Last year’s newsletter links to it. A referral partner pasted it into their resources page. And search engines spent a year learning that the old address was the one to show people searching for tax help in your area.
Pick one permanent address, something like /tax-season/ or /tax-preparation/, and keep it for as long as the firm exists. Leave the year out of the URL. The year belongs in the content, where you can change it in seconds. Google’s own guidance on moving a site with URL changes lays out how much careful work goes into changing addresses without losing search visibility, including mapping old URLs to new ones and using server-side permanent redirects. That is a reasonable process when you genuinely need it. It is a lot of avoidable work to repeat every January for a page whose purpose has not changed.
If you already have a string of year-specific pages, you can consolidate. Choose the evergreen address, move the best current content onto it, and have each old yearly page permanently redirect to the new one. From then on, every old bookmark and every old link lands somewhere current.
Inside the page, make the seasonal details easy to find and easy to change. That can be as simple as keeping all of the dates, hours, and year references together in one clearly labeled section near the top. Avoid scattering “for the 2025 tax year” throughout five paragraphs. When the details live in one place, whoever does the refresh only has to look in one place, and the chance of missing a stray reference drops considerably. Write the evergreen parts so they hold up regardless of the year. “Upload your documents through our secure portal as soon as you receive them” works every season. “Upload your 2025 W-2 before your appointment” needs attention every season, so keep sentences like that inside the seasonal section where they will be checked.
A note on dates in particular: resist the urge to type out deadlines from memory, and avoid copying last year’s numbers forward. Filing deadlines can shift when they fall on a weekend or holiday, and disaster relief can move them for specific areas. Each season, confirm the dates against the IRS and your state tax agency before you publish them, and consider linking clients to the official source so they can check for themselves.
A Yearly Rhythm for the Page: Pre-Season, Peak, and the Quiet Months
A tax-season page has a natural cycle, and it works best when the page changes with it. Most firms only think about the January version. The page also needs a sensible state after the spring deadline and during extension season in the fall, or it will sit there all summer promising appointments you are no longer taking.
Before the season opens
Sometime in late fall or early winter, before clients start looking, run through a short refresh. This is the checklist that matters most, and it rarely takes long when the page is built well:
- Update every tax-year reference in the seasonal section
- Confirm this season’s filing and extension dates against official sources
- Set the seasonal office hours, including any weekend or evening availability
- Test the booking link from start to finish and make sure it opens the current calendar
- Review the document checklist with your team and add or remove items
- Check that the client portal link works and the login page loads
- Update any fees, engagement steps, or new client policies that changed
- Read the page on a phone, all the way to the bottom
That last item catches more problems than any other. A large share of clients will open the page on their phone while standing in line or sitting in the car, trying to remember whether they need to bring their 1099s. If the booking button is buried, the checklist is hard to read on a small screen, or the hours are hidden in a footer, the page is failing at the moment it matters.
After the spring deadline
Once the main filing deadline passes, the page should say so plainly. Thank clients for the season, explain how to reach you for anything that comes up during the rest of the year, and point people who still need help toward your extension process or year-round services. If you stop booking new tax prep clients after a certain date, say that too, along with when you will open the calendar again. A short, honest off-season message reads far better than an April booking page still sitting live in July.
Extension season and the fall
Many firms are busiest again in the early fall, when extended returns come due. The page can reflect that with a brief section for extension clients: what you still need from them, how to upload it, and how to reach the office. Then, as the fall work wraps up, the cycle starts over with the pre-season refresh.
Three states, refreshed on a predictable schedule, on one stable page. That is the whole system. It also happens to be the kind of work that gets skipped when everyone in the office is buried in returns, which is worth keeping in mind when you decide who owns it.
Security, Scams, Hours, and Access: The Details Clients Judge You On
A few parts of the page deserve extra attention, because they affect client trust and client safety more directly than the rest.
Start with how documents reach you. If your page says “email us your documents,” change it. Sensitive tax documents belong in a secure client portal or a secure file upload, and the page should say that clearly and link straight to it. The IRS publishes Publication 4557, Safeguarding Taxpayer Data, as a guide for tax professionals on protecting client information, and the spirit of it is hard to miss: the less sensitive data floating around in inboxes, the better. Your website is where clients learn how you expect them to send things, so it should model the secure option every single time. Put the portal link where people will actually see it, ideally near the top of the page and again beside the document checklist, and include a line or two about what to do if they have trouble logging in.
A brief scam-awareness note is worth adding as well. Tax season brings a wave of phishing emails, fake texts, and impersonation attempts, some of them aimed at clients of specific firms. The IRS maintains a page on recognizing tax scams and fraud that you can link to directly. On your own page, a couple of plain sentences go a long way. Tell clients how your firm will and will not contact them, that you will never ask them to pay by gift card or send documents to an unfamiliar address, and that they should call the office using the number on your website if a message ever seems off. This content is evergreen, so you write it once and leave it.
Then make sure your hours match everywhere. Seasonal hours are one of the most common sources of mismatched information online. The website says you are open Saturday mornings in March, but your Google Business Profile still shows weekday hours only, or the reverse. Google’s help documentation on editing your Business Profile covers updating your main hours and setting special hours for holidays and other temporary periods. Make that update part of the same pre-season checklist, so the website and the profile change on the same day. A client who drives over on a Saturday because one of them said you were open is not going to care which one was wrong.
Finally, check the basics of access. Many of your clients are older, some use screen readers or larger text settings, and nearly all of them will use a phone at some point. A simple first look at accessibility covers a few questions: whether headings make sense, whether images have text alternatives, whether text is readable and contrast is strong enough, and whether the page works with a keyboard. Your document checklist should be real text in a list so it can be read aloud, enlarged, and copied. Buttons should say what they do. “Book a tax appointment” tells a client far more than “Click here.”
If you do all of this, the page will feel current and trustworthy to clients without any visual overhaul at all. The design can stay exactly as it is. If the site itself has deeper problems, such as an outdated platform, a layout that breaks on phones, or pages nobody can edit, that is a different conversation, and our guide on how to know when your website needs a redesign covers those signs. For most firms, though, the tax-season problem is an upkeep problem, and upkeep is solved with a system and someone to run it.
Making the Yearly Refresh Someone Else’s Job
The checklist above is simple. The hard part is that it needs to happen right before your busiest stretch of the year, again after the spring deadline when everyone is exhausted, and once more in the fall when extension work is piling up. In a lot of firms, that is exactly when website updates get pushed to “next week” until the season is half over.
This is the kind of work NorthMac handles on a managed basis. With a managed website from NorthMac, your site is built, hosted, updated, secured, and supported for one monthly price, with unlimited update requests included. So the pre-season refresh becomes a request: send over the new dates, hours, booking link, and checklist changes, and they get made. The same goes for the post-deadline update, the extension-season note, and the Google-friendly habit of keeping one stable URL instead of launching a new page every year. If you are curious where the line falls between everyday changes and bigger additions, our post on what counts as a routine managed website update walks through it.
If you are starting fresh or your current site cannot support this kind of setup, NorthMac builds the site and launches it in about seven business days once we have what we need. You can start for $47, which covers your first month; from month two the regular rate is $397 per month. It is month-to-month, you can cancel any time, and the $47 activation is a one-time start fee with no contract attached.
Your clients will be looking for your tax-season page again soon. If you want it current every season without another round of redesign planning, start your managed website for $47 and see what’s included.
