5 Key Considerations When Designing Your Next Banking Website

Building and delivering a new website these days requires both a clear-eyed strategy and ruthless prioritization. Focus on the business impacts that the site should deliver, understand the expectations of your customers, and pick the right technologies (and partners) for the job.

By Michelle Brown, VP Sales & Marketing ZAG Interactive

Published on January 15th, 2025 in Digital Banking

If you’re thinking that this is the year you’re going to redesign your website, it’s essential that you go into this incredibly important project with the right goals, clear expectations, and internal consensus. Websites for banks and credit unions can be simply a gateway to your online banking platform – or they can be a powerful channel that attracts, communicates and converts. Institutions that expect more than just a pretty site and have a strategic plan in place will get more out of it.

So, if you want to ensure that this critical channel delivers everything it can for your institution, here are five key considerations for every website redesign.

Consideration 1: Treat This With the Importance It Deserves

"We just need to point people to this website for information" – said no successful CMO ever. Your website is one of the most significant pieces of your institution’s marketing plan, so treat a redesign project with the importance, respect and budget it commands.

• Not just the front door – but the hub for your digital efforts. You should be using your website as the centerpiece of your marketing efforts, driving traffic to it from all of your channels, and truly treating it as a digital branch. A decade ago, people wanted a pretty site that allowed people to log into online banking. But times have changed, and so have websites, visitor expectations and consumer behavior. To meet these modern standards, you need a firm plan for a site that is custom-crafted for your institution.

• A reason for everything. Don’t just follow the herd. Determine exactly what your new website should be doing so that your agency can strategize exactly how to get you there. Not a single item on your site should be there without a clear purpose. Challenge the norm and make sure that every interaction is valuable for users, and your institution.

• Justify your budget by measuring results. Maybe you want to increase loan applications, or maybe you need to increase membership/customers. You need to know how your current site is working against these goals now. Make sure that you have all the tracking you can on your site now to determine your "baseline" or else there is no quantitative way to measure success. Then, assuming your site is created against these precise goals – you can watch the fruits of your labor deliver once the new site launches. You will need to continually tweak things along the way, but your new site should be a strategic powerhouse – capable of delivering real results.

Consideration 2: Define your ‘Must-Haves’ and ‘Nice to Haves’ – Plus Future Needs

Before you request quotes from agencies, make sure you have a defined list of must-haves and nice-to-haves. This list should reflect your full organization’s needs, so you don’t have any surprises once it comes time to start your project. Then, sort that list into must-haves and nice-to-haves so that when you are aligning your needs with your budget, you have a more logical way to trim, should you have to. Some popular questions to think about when making this list include:

What are your top 10 goals for the site? Make a list of the most obvious expectations (e.g. responsive design, fast-loading, ADA conformant) and then supplement that with goals unique to your institution (e.g. improve the user experience on product detail pages, allow visitors to compare products, improve SEO rankings, better track results). Folks in your organization will likely have a lot of opinions, so be sure to be a team player and solicit them all before you truly dig in, to avoid rework or scope creep later.

Who is going to be managing the site and what would make their life easier? What is frustrating about your site now? Are there tools they might need to make their lives easier? What does the workflow and internal approval process look like and is there an opportunity to improve that?

What tools will you be providing to help your visitors? Will you be offering a database of FAQs to help visitors and support your customer service team? Will you be offering articles, videos or podcasts in a blog to support financial literacy? Do you want to better present your products by life stage? Think about what tools you need for your new site so those get scoped properly.

How are you attracting visitors to the site and do you need help with inbound marketing support? Most website agencies should be able to offer SEO, paid search, email marketing and other tactics to drive quality visitors to your site. Determine what resources in-house you have for this, and what you will need help with. You’ll also want to plan for proper page destinations for each of these efforts as part of your redesign efforts.

Who is going to be providing copy and imagery? Hint – this is a large effort to take on internally with your day-to-day job so generally institutions look for this to be done externally. That said, your job is to ensure that you define the right tone you’re looking for and provide as much source material as possible. This likely will involve you having to work with multiple people at your institution, including your favorite colleagues in legal and compliance.

What third parties are being integrated with the site? Just linking to third parties? No biggie. But if you are going to be integrating the site with any third parties (e.g., chat, loan applications, CRM, internal rates systems) you need to define what those specific requirements are so this is scoped properly. The more detail provided, the more accurate your quote can be.

How will you be measuring success? Nearly every institution uses Google Analytics but "out of the box" this doesn’t give you what you need to truly measure success unless you customize it. Will you be adding event tracking to all interactions? How will you track interactions on third-party sites? What kind of reporting will you need? What will your ongoing needs be after the site launches? What limitations does your organization have regarding tracking?

Of course, a website should also be considerate of any future plans you may know of. If you will be introducing online account opening or switching vendors – build the site with calls to action that are easily editable. If you will be onboarding an online appointment scheduling vendor – but it won’t happen before the site launches – tell your vendor this so they can recommend a plan for when the time is right. In addition, ensure your navigation approach is scalable to accommodate changes your site will likely endure in its 3-5 year shelf life. Nothing should look like an afterthought if you are able to just do some simple future-planning from the onset.

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Consideration 3: Selecting a Content Management System

If you’re in a marketing role, selecting a Content Management System (CMS) may be outside your comfort zone, but this is a very important decision, so be sure to pull in any internal resources that can help make the right decision for your institution. Furthermore, technology has evolved at a rapid pace recently, so you’ll need to think about if you need a traditional CMS or would benefit from a Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

CMS options: Without getting too geeked out, you will first need to choose a CMS or DXP. The former is what you likely are well aware of and have worked in for years. Think WordPress, Umbraco and others.

The latter is newer to the party, depending on the DXP – and basically adds a bit more "horsepower" to a CMS with features like personalization and marketing automation – then delivering them across channels, languages, etc. Choices include Kentico, Sitecore and others. The reason you need to define your goals before choosing a CMS or DXP is because your choices and budget are impacted by this decision. An experienced agency can properly guide you through this process.

Lower budget? If you have a very lean budget, then your choices are going to simply be more narrow. You will want to select a CMS that allows you to easily manage and publish all of the content you routinely manage (e.g., rates, promotions, alerts). And you will want to ensure that the CMS is well-documented and supported so that as technology evolves, your site can progress with it.

Word to the wise: you will want to steer clear of anything that locks your organization in – such as a proprietary CMS that is only managed by one vendor or even a very long-term contract. If there is one thing that is for certain, it’s that things change, and you don’t want to be constrained in any way should you need to "break up" with an agency or have something major happen with your organization.

Dig deeper:

Consideration 4: Personalizing the Digital Experience

For years agencies have talked about personalization, but the technology wasn’t always quite there. With recent rapid technological advancements, there are now so many ways to personalize your website in order to create relevance for audiences. And the great news is that it truly works. Some CMSs or DXPs have built-in personalization capabilities, while there are plenty of third parties out there that also offer content personalization. Whichever approach you take – which may even be a combination of both – identifying personas and crafting a personalization strategy can positively impact your website’s ability to deliver messaging to the right audience at the right time.

• Define how personalization would benefit your goals: Maybe you have a large geographic footprint so want to serve up different messages to folks in different locations. Or perhaps you want to personalize your website experience for customers/members versus non-customers/members. You may even want to custom tailor a page based on someone’s behavior – such as a page they’ve previously visited or an email they clicked on. This is all possible through personalization.

• Know that it’s not a one-time investment – and isn’t cheap: When you launch a site you might have certain personas in place, but that is likely to evolve as your organization does. Through analytics tracking, you will want to measure what’s working or not, and then likely change your persona strategy over time. Implementing personalization requires a financial investment that – though it likely will more than pay off – is a consideration when budgeting for your site.

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Consideration 5: Hosting and Security

You work hard to manage your brand, so be sure that you make wise decisions when it comes to hosting your website. Your specific requirements are going to be as unique as your institution, but going into a site hosting contract should be done methodically, and with the right folks at your organization. Chances are, that likely isn’t you, so before you solicit quotes from agencies, get a list of those requirements.

Managed hosting: Most institutions choose a managed hosting provider – who will be fully responsible for the hosting and security of the site. As part of your vendor selection process, you’ll want to define needs and confirm conditions, including but not limited to:

  • Shared or dedicated hosting environment
  • Content staging server or sandbox environment to play around in
  • Load balancing requirements
  • Custom maintenance page needs, which is fully branded and trustworthy in the event of planned maintenance or site downtime
  • Additional security requirements that may benefit you such as advanced bot protection, encryption, intrusion detection, screen scraping protection, penetration testing and so much more.

In-house hosting? While not as common, some banks and credit unions host their own website. The agency you select will need to work with your in-house resources to launch the new site, so the teams need to connect early on to ensure everyone has what they need well in advance of launch day.

You will also want to understand if site hosting comes out of your institution’s marketing or technology budget.

While a website redesign is a large effort, and a relatively large expense, it’s also one of the most rewarding projects to take on. Your website has never been more critical than it is now – and is a one-stop-shop for establishing your brand, communicating with current and prospective customers/members, attracting audiences, providing valuable customer service and so much more. Go into this project with defined goals, a realistic budget, flexibility and an agency that you trust. It’s going to be great!

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