The Mortgage Blog

Qualified advice and expert insight

The Mortgage Blog is a property market information and mortgage advice website run by James Blackler. Seeking to build upon a two-decade career of extensive knowledge and understanding of the property market, James created The Mortgage Blog to share expert insight and qualified mortgage advice with homebuyers.

Complete autonomy over the website was very important for James. He needed to be able to update and optimise it quickly to generate leads, publish timely content and achieve best possible SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Building an independent business

With an accomplished track record in sales and the property industry, James felt it was the right time to take on a new challenge as a qualified mortgage broker. Leveraging his extensive background in property, technical expertise, and adeptness in resolving complex client home-buying issues, The Mortgage Blog connects clients with experienced mortgage brokers who can help organise custom-tailored finance options that carefully match their current and future personal and financial requirements.

Switching to running an independent business meant setting up a brand-new website from scratch - one that reflected the quality and expertise James has to offer. He also had to navigate the challenge of competing with established mortgage brokers.

To give himself the best possible chance, he needed an effective website that could be set up quickly and fully optimised for SEO so that it featured highly in Google search rankings. This meant the next step was to find a web designer and hosting provider whose commitment to quality and value matched his own.

Switching to quality hosting

Although he had connections to Krystal (he’s our CEO Simon’s brother!) James was trying to bootstrap as much as possible to get his website up and running, so had used a local website design company for its first iteration. The design agency used Bluehost as their website provider, but James soon found Bluehost’s reliability to be inadequate for his needs.

Shortly after getting his site up and running, Bluehost performed a system update which negatively affected its uptime and performance. The decision to move swiftly over to Krystal was made even easier. (To be fair, James had already been getting some fairly disapproving looks from Simon about using an inferior competitor!)

Despite his admittedly limited experience in web hosting, James found the transfer to Krystal seamless. The Krystal support team were on hand to guide him through every step, giving him the confidence to work outside his technical comfort zone.

As James says himself: “The support team have been great. I’m fairly new regarding websites and hosting terminology, so it’s been a steep learning curve, but they’ve been very supportive and fixed everything that I’ve managed to break!”

Set up for sustainable success

With a high-performing, fully SEO-optimised website, James has been able to improve his ranking on search engines, build a network and grow his business. After some optimisation, his website now gets a GTmetrix Grade of A with 97% performance and 96% structure, which is fantastic for a first website!

James also has aspirations for The Mortgage Blog to match Krystal and become B Corp certified. He’s a firm believer that business owners have a responsibility to consider their environmental impact and implement better business practices.

Knowing that Krystal is true to its company values and that a large amount of our profit goes into projects like veritree, Million Tree Pledge, 1% for the Planet and Ecologi helps James’ business lower its digital emissions and put him in good stead for a sustainable, successful future.

PS - If you'd like expert mortgage advice, be sure to mention Krystal when contacting The Mortgage Blog and they'll waive their Broker fee!