How to make a bank website that customers trust with their money

TL;DR: How to make a bank website

This guide covers the site for a community bank or credit union: the domain, a starting template, and the pages a customer looks for first, including personal and business accounts, a dated rates page, and branch pages with hours. Yola website builder gives you Services and Pricing blocks to lay out accounts and rates, so your own staff can edit a figure the day it changes. Online banking is not part of this build. The site links out to your core banking provider's portal instead.

The second half covers branch and staff photography, an application form that asks for a name, a product and a branch and nothing sensitive, the deposit insurance and charter details your institution is entitled to show, a page of financial literacy workshops and holiday closures, and local search for phrases like "bank in [city]". Work through the ten steps and you have a site your team can keep current between compliance reviews.

What to include

Top features of a bank website

How to make a bank
website in 10 steps

Your domain is what a customer types after seeing it on a statement, a branch window or a sponsor board at the ballpark. Use the institution's name, with your city or county where that is how people know you, and take the .com if you can get it. It matters more here than in most trades, because a customer who lands on a near miss of your address has a real reason to worry about who they are dealing with.

Skip hyphens and numbers. Someone repeating "first-county-bank-1" over the phone will drop both and end up somewhere else, and for a bank that is a phishing risk rather than a lost visit. Register the obvious misspellings too if the budget allows, and point them at the same site. Whatever you register, use the same name on your Google Business Profile, your branch signage and your statements.

Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same flow you build the site in, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year. If your institution already has a hostname used for online banking, leave it exactly where your core banking provider put it and keep the marketing site on your main name.

Nobody on your marketing committee needs to write code to get this site live. Yola lets you edit text, swap photos and move sections yourself, the same way you would edit a document, so a branch manager or a marketing coordinator can fix a typo without raising a ticket with IT.

Answer a few questions about the institution and Yola's AI Website Builder puts together a first draft to work from. The full set of AI tools sits on the paid plans, and the free plan has basic AI. Treat whatever comes back as a starting point, because every line about accounts, rates and insurance goes past compliance before it publishes.

Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site, so there is nothing for your IT provider to stand up. Start from a template that already has the sections a financial institution needs, rather than a blank page.

Start from a template

Bank templates to start from

Six pages do most of the work. Keep the set small on purpose, because every page you add is another page compliance has to read and another page somebody has to keep current.

Draw one line clearly while you plan them. These pages are your public marketing site: what you offer, what it pays or costs, where your branches are, and how somebody gets started. Online banking is not on the list and never will be. That runs on your core banking provider, and your site sends customers to it with a plain button in the header that lands on the provider's own secure address.

Build these first, then add anything else once the essentials are live:

Name the products the way your own tellers name them at the counter, not the way a vendor brochure names them. Somebody comparing three institutions is looking for a checking account with no monthly fee, a 12 month CD rate, or a mortgage pre-approval, and they will not translate "wealth solutions" into any of those.

Give each product the numbers people actually choose on: the minimum to open, the monthly fee and how to waive it, the APY with its term, and the fees that apply. Where a figure moves, link to the rates page instead of repeating it in five places. One page to update is one page for compliance to re-read, and it is the difference between a rate change taking ten minutes and taking an afternoon.

Non-deposit products need separate treatment. Investments, annuities and insurance are not deposits and are not insured the way your accounts are, so if you offer them, keep them on their own page with the disclosure your compliance team gives you, worded exactly as they give it. The same goes for anything provided by a third party under your name.

Yola's ready-made Services and Pricing blocks handle this layout: a product name, a short description and a figure sitting together, editable by your own team the morning a rate changes.

Stock photography is the default on bank websites, and it is why so many of them look like each other. A picture of two strangers shaking hands over a desk proves nothing. Photograph what a national competitor cannot: your actual lobby, the drive-through, the ATM somebody will use at nine at night, and the branch and lending staff who will sit across the desk, with their names and job titles under the photo.

Shoot straight on and in good light. Get written consent from staff before a photo goes up, and reshoot when someone leaves rather than leaving a stranger's face on a branch page. Photos from what you sponsor belong here too: the shred day, the little league team, the scholarship handed over at the high school. That is the part of the bank a rate table cannot show.

Name image files for what is in them, like oakridge-bank-main-street-branch.jpg rather than IMG_2041.jpg, and put the same description in the alt text, so branch photos can turn up in a local image search. Yola's ready-made Galleries block holds a set like this. Leave a slot empty until the real photograph exists rather than filling it with stock, because a stock branch photo tells a customer nothing about yours.

Somebody reading your rates page at ten at night cannot open an account there and then, and should not be able to. What the form does is start the process: who they are, how to reach them, which product they want, and which branch suits them. You call back or you book them an appointment, and the account gets opened in your own secure system, where it belongs.

Be strict about the fields. A public website form must never ask for a Social Security number, a date of birth, an account number, or anything else that works as a credential. A name, an email or phone, the product and the preferred branch are enough to respond well, and anything beyond that is a liability sitting in an inbox. You choose exactly which fields appear, because Yola's contact form is customizable rather than fixed, and the Forms block help article walks through setting it up.

A submission is an inquiry, not an application and not an order. Yola sends an automatic confirmation so the sender knows it arrived, and that confirmation is worth agreeing with compliance as well: say you will be in touch, and say nothing that could read as approval. Then follow up the next business day, because that is where the account is won.

Somebody deciding where to put their savings is asking one question: is this institution real, is it regulated, and is my money insured. Answer it on the home page and in the footer of every page, not on an About page three clicks in.

Show only what your institution is actually entitled to show, worded the way your regulator and your compliance team require. A bank that is an FDIC member says so; a federally insured credit union states its NCUA coverage instead. Where you lend on homes, the Equal Housing Lender line applies. Your routing number, your charter and the year it was granted, and the agency you answer to all belong somewhere a customer can find them in a few seconds. None of this is a marketing claim, so resist the urge to dress it up.

A community bank runs on the calendar more than it realizes. Financial literacy workshops at the high school, first-time homebuyer seminars, shred days, the annual meeting if you are a credit union, and the federal holidays when every lobby is shut. One page, kept current, covers all of it.

Each entry needs the date, the start time, the branch or venue, what it costs if anything, and how to reserve a seat, which points at your inquiry form rather than a separate booking tool. This is not a calendar feature. It is a page your marketing coordinator edits by hand, which takes a couple of minutes, and the year's holiday closures are worth adding in one sitting while you have the federal calendar open.

Leave past events up. A list of homebuyer seminars that actually ran says more about a bank being part of the town than any sentence about community commitment.

People looking for a bank type a place name far more often than an institution name, so the map pack is where a branch is found or missed. This is one area where a community bank can outrank a national one, because the national bank has a single templated listing for a branch where you have a whole page. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side, and the rest is work you do on Google and on your own branch pages.

Before the site is announced anywhere, test it on a phone the way a customer would. Tap the phone number, tap through to online banking and confirm it lands on your provider's address and not a copy of it, submit the inquiry form yourself, and check that the automatic confirmation arrives.

Check page speed on the pages that carry the work, and have somebody outside marketing read the rates page against the rate sheet on the same day. Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts on its own between phone, tablet and laptop, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups.

After launch the job is maintenance, and for a bank most of it is dates. Rates get a review date and a named owner, and fee schedules and disclosures get the same. Branch hours shift around the holidays, staff photos go stale when somebody leaves, and a site that is kept current holds its search ranking better than one left alone. Put the review dates in a shared calendar and make sure more than one person can log in and make the edit.

Common bank website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of mistakes turn up on community bank sites, and each one either costs an application or creates work for compliance.

How much does a bank website cost?

What follows is the cost of the marketing site, not of your core banking systems, which are a separate contract with a separate vendor. On Yola the site itself starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo when you want your own domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year.

Hiring the build out costs considerably more than the software. A freelancer or a small agency building a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, and agencies that specialize in financial institutions usually charge more again, with an annual maintenance contract attached.

Be honest with yourself about where the real cost sits, though. For a bank it is not the software, it is the review cycle: the hours legal and compliance spend on rate copy, disclosures and product descriptions. Building in-house does not remove that cost. What it does change is what happens when a reviewer sends a correction back, because somebody at the bank makes the edit that afternoon instead of opening a ticket with an agency and waiting a week for a one-line change.