Search "mortgage broker website designer" and you'll land on two kinds of results. One hands you a template with your name swapped in, live in three days, thirty-five dollars a month after that. The other generates a draft with AI in under a minute, then has a real person "customise" it over the following month. Both will get you a website. Neither is thinking about whether it ranks.
That gap - between having a website and having a website that shows up when a borrower searches for you - is the whole story here.
What a mortgage broker website designer is actually being hired to do
Most brokers think they're hiring someone to make the site look professional. Photos, layout, a colour scheme that isn't beige. That part's easy. Almost anyone can do it.
What's actually hard - and what most designers never mention in the sales call - is building something Google is willing to send financial searches to. We've written before about why Google doesn't rank most broker websites, and the short version is this: mortgage advice gets extra scrutiny, and a site with no named individual, no licence number, and no indexed content fails that check before it's even evaluated on design.
A designer who's only building for how the homepage looks on launch day is building half a website.
The two paths most brokers end up on
A template shop will get you live in three to five business days for around $199 upfront and $35 a month. Pick a theme, swap in your name and photo, done by Friday.
An AI-first platform skips the theme-picking. It drafts a full site in under sixty seconds, then a designer refines it over the next thirty days. Same destination, slower and more expensive route to get there.
Neither path is dishonest. Both are optimised for what they're selling: speed to launch. Most of them sell SEO afterward as a bolt-on package once the site's live - offshore SEO add-ons in this market run $299 to $800 a month. That's worth being sceptical of. SEO takes time, specificity, and actual work. Anyone pricing it like a subscription is cutting corners somewhere, and you'll feel it when Google runs its next core update.
Looking good and ranking are different jobs
During outreach audits, the most common thing we hear when we point out a bad PageSpeed score or missing SEO fundamentals is some version of: but the website looks good though.
It usually does. Clean design, professional photos, clear navigation - the designer did that part properly. And a mobile PageSpeed score in the 40s. Zero indexed blog content. A meta title that's just the business name, repeated on every page. No schema. No sitemap ever submitted to Google.
A website can be visually polished and completely invisible on Google at the same time. Most broker websites are proof of it. If the designer you're talking to can't tell you their actual plan for indexing, schema, and page speed - not just "we do SEO too" - you're about to pay for the first kind.
What to ask before you hire anyone
- Can they show you the mobile PageSpeed score of a site they've built for another broker - not their own agency's homepage?
- Will your site show a real person's name, photo, and ASIC credit licence number on the homepage, or just a business name?
- Are they building a genuine page for each area you serve, or one generic "service areas" list?
- Who owns the content and the domain after launch - you, or them?
- Is there already another broker in your postcode signed up with the same designer?
That last one matters more than it sounds. A designer with no answer to it is treating your market the same way they'd treat anyone else's.
What getting this wrong actually costs
The numbers make it less abstract. 92% of searchers never go past page one of Google. Fewer than 10% of Australian broker websites have anything close to meaningful SEO in place. That's not a crowded market to break into - it's a mostly empty room.
One missed lead a week, at average conversion, is roughly three settled loans a month you never see. At an average upfront commission of $4,165 per loan, that's $12,495 a month going to whichever broker's website actually showed up. The trail on those loans over five years adds up to roughly another $150,000, sitting with someone else.
A website designer isn't a line item. They're standing between you and that $12,495.
Where Mackay Growth fits into this
We build websites for mortgage brokers - one per area, which means once we're working with a broker in your postcode, we're not taking a second one there.
If what you want is a live site by Friday for $199, that's a legitimate option, and it's not us - go get the template. If you want a site built by someone who's actually read Google's guidelines for what counts as helpful, trustworthy content, sets up the schema and location pages properly, and isn't about to build the identical thing for the broker down the road from you, that's a different conversation.
We're a year old. We don't have twenty years of case studies to point at. What we do have is a working list of the same six mistakes we find on almost every broker website we audit - more on that, and on Corbin, on the about page.
Worth a conversation
Your website should be doing the work of finding borrowers while you're in a client meeting. A designer who understands that builds differently to one who's just trying to get you live by Friday.
We take one broker per area. Either that's going to be you, or it's the broker down the road who found this page first. Get in touch if you want it to be you.
Your website should be working while you're in a client meeting. Right now it probably isn't.
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