Web Hosting for Mortgage Brokers

Start here: are you allowed to have this site at all

This is the first question, not the last one, and getting it wrong is expensive in a way no hosting decision is.

If you are a loan officer employed by a bank or a large lender, you very often cannot run an independent website. Not a personal one, not a team one, not a "just my bio and a contact form" one. Marketing material usually has to go through the employer's own review process, and a site you set up on your own is marketing material. Some employers permit a locked-down profile page on an approved template and nothing else. Some permit nothing.

So before you buy a domain, ask your compliance department in writing what you are allowed to publish. Independent brokers running their own shop have a different set of obligations, but they still have obligations. We are describing the shape of the problem here, not giving you a ruling. Check with your own compliance officer or adviser before you publish anything.

If the answer comes back as no, stop. A site taken down after a compliance review still cost you the build, and it may have cost you more than that.

Published rates, and why a stale one is worse than none

Here is the failure this whole page is built around. A broker publishes a rate table in a good week. Rates look sharp, the table looks like proof, and it goes up on the homepage. Eight months later it is still there. Every visitor is being quoted a number that cannot be honoured, and the first thing that happens on every call is a correction.

That is bad for two separate reasons. Commercially, you have set an expectation you now have to walk back, which is the worst possible way to open a conversation with someone about money. And from an advertising standpoint, a rate shown without the surrounding detail, or one that no longer reflects anything you can actually offer, is exactly the sort of thing that draws attention you do not want. Advertising rules around mortgage terms are specific and they are not the same in every state. Ask your compliance adviser what your table has to say alongside the number.

Three honest options

1. Publish nothing

   Say plainly that rates move daily and invite people to ask. This is the safest option and it costs you less traffic than you think, because someone ready to borrow will make the call anyway. It is what we suggest to most brokers who do not have someone whose job it is to update the site.

2. Publish a live feed

   Pull rates from a provider so the page cannot go stale. This is a real product with a real cost, and it needs to keep working. Set yourself a reminder to actually look at the page every month, because a broken feed usually fails by showing the last good number forever rather than showing an error.

3. Publish with a date, and mean it

   Show a rate with the date it was accurate and the terms it assumed, then update it on a schedule you will genuinely keep. Weekly is realistic. Monthly is honest. "When I remember" is how you end up with last spring's table.

The middle option is the one most sites try and the one most sites abandon. If nobody at the firm owns the update, choose the first option and be at peace with it.

If you take the third route, put the date immediately next to the number, not in small print at the bottom. A visitor who sees a date takes the number as a snapshot. A visitor who sees no date takes it as a promise.

The calculator page is the one people actually use

Look at where visitors go on a mortgage site and the pattern is consistent. They open a calculator. Payment, affordability, sometimes an amortisation schedule. They will spend more time on that page than on your bio, your process page and your testimonials combined.

That has two consequences worth acting on. The first is that it is worth making the calculator good, because it is your best chance to be useful before anyone speaks to you. The second is that it is the page most likely to slow your site down, because embedded third-party calculators tend to arrive with a stack of external scripts attached.

What actually goes wrong

The calculator loads from someone else's server. When that server is slow, your page is slow. When that provider changes their embed code or shuts the product down, your most-used page breaks, and you will find out from a client rather than from a monitor.

A simple calculator that runs in the visitor's own browser has none of those problems, loads instantly, and does not need a bigger hosting plan to feel fast. If you do use an embedded one, load it on its own page rather than on the homepage, so the rest of the site stays quick.

Forms and what people type into them

The other thing on these sites is a form, and mortgage forms attract information nobody should be emailing. Income. Employment. Sometimes, if the form invites it, a Social Security number. Do not invite it. Ask for name, contact details and a short description, then take everything else through your secure loan origination system where it belongs.

Make sure the site is served over HTTPS regardless, which is table stakes now. Our SSL certificates page covers what that involves. And treat the mailbox those enquiries land in as sensitive, which is an argument for proper business email at your own domain rather than a free address shared with the family.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and we are not compliance advisers. What we can do is make the parts of your site that have to stay correct genuinely easy for you to change, so your identification and your rate page are never hostage to whoever built the site.

If somebody else currently holds your domain or hosting account, that is the first thing to untangle. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your site runs on and we will tell you plainly whether the plan you are paying for is the right one.