Most law firms redesign their website for the wrong reason: it looks dated. That is a fair trigger, but it leads to the wrong brief, one about colours and photographs, when the questions that decide whether the new site works are about structure, content and what happens to the enquiries.
This is the guide I would want a managing partner to read before talking to anyone who builds websites. It covers what to decide first, which platform suits which firm, the order the work should happen in, how to move the old site without losing the search traffic it has built up, and what to ask before signing anything. What the finished site must contain is covered separately in What a law firm actually needs from its website.
Decide what the site is for before anyone designs it
A law firm website usually has two jobs: turn a stranger into an enquiry, and reassure someone who already has your name that they have found a proper firm. Which matters more depends on the work. A high-street conveyancing and wills practice lives on the first; a niche commercial practice that gets most work by referral lives on the second.
Write down, before the first meeting, the three or four areas of work you most want more of, where those clients are, and how they contact you today. Those answers shape everything else: which pages exist, what the home page leads with, and what counts as success six months after launch.
Structure: one page per area of work
The sitemap matters more than the design. Each area of work should have its own page, written for the client, with fees where the SRA requires them, the process, who will handle the matter and how to start. Each office gets its own page with its address and map. Each fee earner gets a profile.
Keep the navigation to what a client is looking for: the areas of work, the people, fees, and how to get in touch. News, careers and community pages belong lower down. A visitor who has to work out whether “Private Client” covers wills is a visitor who may give up.
Content first, then design
The most common reason a law firm site launches late is that the pages were designed before anyone wrote them, and then nobody had time to write them. Reverse the order. Agree the structure, write or rewrite the practice area and fee pages, then design around real text.
This also produces a better design. A page laid out for a real fee table and a real explanation of the conveyancing process looks different from one laid out for three lines of placeholder copy, and it holds up when a partner adds a paragraph later.
Choosing a platform
For most firms the choice is between WordPress, a hosted website builder, or a custom build. None is right for everyone.
WordPress suits a firm that wants to edit its own pages, publish articles and keep options open. Its weakness is upkeep: plugins and the core need updating, and a site nobody maintains becomes slow and insecure. Budget for maintenance, not just the build.
A hosted builder such as Squarespace, Wix or Webflow is quicker and cheaper to run and needs little maintenance, at the cost of flexibility: unusual features, integrations with case management systems and fine control over speed can be harder.
A custom build makes sense when the website does more than publish pages: online quotes, client portals, intake flows that feed a case management system. It costs more to build and needs a developer to change, so it should be justified by something the site has to do, not by wanting something different.
Whatever the platform, make sure the firm owns the domain, the hosting account and the content, and can move them to another provider without the agency's permission. Ask this before signing.
The rules a new site has to meet
A UK firm's website has obligations that are easy to miss in a design project. The SRA Transparency Rules require published price and service information for the listed services, the complaints procedure, and the SRA clickable logo. UK GDPR and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations mean analytics and marketing cookies need consent before they are set, so the cookie banner has to actually work, not just inform.
Accessibility matters too. The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and WCAG 2.2 at level AA is the usual benchmark for a website: readable contrast, everything usable with a keyboard, forms with proper labels, and text alternatives for images. It is cheaper to build in from the start than to retrofit, and it makes the site better for everyone.
Speed and the phone
Most people searching for a solicitor do it on a phone, often at a stressful moment. Design for that first: a clear phone number and enquiry button, pages that load quickly on a mobile connection, forms short enough to finish one-handed. Ask for the Core Web Vitals to be measured before launch, not after, and for the photographs to be optimised rather than uploaded straight from the camera.
Moving the old site without losing its search traffic
An old site often ranks for searches that bring in work, even if nobody likes how it looks. A careless relaunch throws that away. Before anything goes live, list every page that receives visits from search, using Search Console, and decide where each one goes on the new site. Old addresses must redirect permanently to their closest new page; a page that simply disappears loses whatever it had built up.
On launch day, check that the redirects work, that the new site is not accidentally blocked from search engines, and that the sitemap is submitted in Search Console. Then watch the enquiries and search visibility weekly for the first two months, when problems still have an obvious cause.
What drives the cost
There is no honest single price for a law firm website. What moves it is the number of areas of work and offices, who writes the content, whether the design is bespoke or adapted from a theme, integrations with case management or booking systems, migration from the old site, and ongoing maintenance. When comparing quotes, compare those items, not the headline figure, and check that writing the content and setting up redirects are actually included.
Questions to ask whoever builds it
Who writes the content, and who checks it against the SRA rules? Will we own the domain, hosting and code? How will the old pages redirect, and who checks that rankings survive the move? How is the site tested for accessibility and speed before launch? Who updates it afterwards, at what cost, and how quickly? How will we know whether the new site brings in more enquiries than the old one?
A builder with good answers to those questions is worth more than one with the best portfolio.
If you would like a second opinion on a brief or a quote, or someone to run the project end to end, that is part of the work I do with firms. A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether I can help.
