Build or redesign the WordPress website for your law firm.

A lawyer's site can stay online for years while becoming less useful: a dated message, too wide pages of expertise, a discreet form, slowness on the phone, low local visibility. Rarely a single cause. Most often, an accumulation: and that's why the question "do you have to do everything again?" has no answer until you have read the site.

What a redesign loses when it's poorly prepared

A redesign may cause visibility to be lost if useful pages disappear, their addresses change without redirection, or important content is removed. Before we change the site, we take up the pages that are visible in Google and those that contribute to the contact when the data allow.

We check the deleted pages, the address changes, the indexing of the preproduction and the links of the firm's Google Business Profile. Article redesigning your law firm's website while preserving SEO details the preparation; errors of a law firm's website redesign present the checkpoints.

Decide page by page, with a written reason

The inventory gives us a list of existing URLs, the data Search Console provides about them, and a basis for deciding. Five decisions cover most cases.

The firm can reread this list before the switch. Each decision is documented and the corresponding redirections are prepared and verified.

Pages a law firm's website needs

Someone looking for a lawyer scans a website to answer three questions: does this firm handle my problem, can I trust it and how do I contact it? Pages should follow that order.

• One page per main expertise. Employment, business, property, family, construction and litigation: every important practice area deserves a page written in the client's language. It explains the situation, what the firm does and how a first appointment works.
• The firm and one record per lawyer. Professional background, bar membership, practice areas and spoken languages. These details help visitors identify the lawyer they need.
• Information about the fees. Without fee schedule if you don't want to, but explaining the terms: package, hourly rate, fee agreement, first consultation. The firm chooses the information needed to communicate before a first contact.
• Easy to find contact. Phone clickable from a phone, full address, access plan, short form, and a sentence on the usual response time.
• Legal information and privacy policy. The firm provides or validates the information to be published.
• Substantive content, if the firm wants to write. An article every two months, really useful, is better than a news feed abandoned in 2023 and still online.

The details of this structure are given in our article on the essential pages of a lawyer's website.

The contents and statements to be validated by the firm

The firm approves legal content, professional disclosures and communication choices before publication. We prepare the website's structure and implementation; questions concerning professional conduct are addressed with the firm and its qualified advisers.

• The firm's identity, bar memberships, practice structure and contact details to display.
• Presentation of practice areas, professional backgrounds, qualifications and specialisations.
• Domain name and possible steps related to online posting.
• References, testimonials and client situations that the firm wishes to raise.
• Contact information, fees, legal information and confidentiality.

These validations are provided for in the schedule. We do not publish sensitive content without the consent of the firm.

Local SEO of a firm

A lot of research combines a matter and a city. Answering this does not require creating one page per commune of the department: it is the reflex that makes sites filled with empty pages: but to make coherent three elements: the expert pages, the contact page and the Google Business Profile of the firm.

In concrete terms, the address, the exact name of the firm and the telephone number must be written the same everywhere, including in the legal directories where the firm is already registered. The Google Business Profile must point to a page that exists and speaks about the right subject. The timetables must be accurate. And if the firm has several offices, each has its own page with its own coordinates, not a block of addresses stacked at the bottom of the welcome. Our article on the local SEO for lawyers uses the point-by-point method.

Several languages, or a large base of articles

Some firms arrive with a volume that changes the nature of the project. On the LexCase Immigration website, it was necessary to manage French, English and simplified Chinese, as well as a news section, while keeping a simple enough basis for the team to publish without calling anyone. This requires preparation for migration, correspondence of addresses from one language to another, and publication tools. This is being prepared at the beginning of the project, not at the time of the changeover.

A firm that doesn't have a site yet

The creation allows you to define the pages and functions useful to the firm from the start. The work then focuses on three points. The domain name first, chosen once and for all and registered on behalf of the firm: never to that of the service provider, it is the precaution that avoids the painful takeovers ten years later. The list of materials then, which determines the structure of the site and which it is better to stop before talking about design. Finally, the texts, which take the time they take: it is almost always they who decide the date of posting.

The rest follows the approach described on our homepage: two working design proposals, hosting in France and a direct contact. A new firm does not need twenty pages. Six well-made pages, a completed Google Business Profile and a working form are more useful than a full website published half-finished.

Maintenance, audit or redesign: choose the right level

Redesign is not always the right first answer. Three situations come back, and they don't call for the same expense.

Maintenance enough when the site is still a good base and what is missing is a follow-up: updates, verified backups, small corrections, someone responding. This is the object of our law firm website maintenance, without commitment.

Audit is imposed when no one really knows the state of the site: speed, pages, security, SEO, technical history, access. One audit sets the record and sets priorities before spending more. It helps the firm to choose the scope of work.

The redesign becomes a sensible choice when the message, structure or technical setup holds the firm back. We start by listing what needs to stay. An old page may look weak while still attracting searches or enquiries. We keep, improve or redirect it rather than remove it automatically. Our article on choosing between maintenance, audit and redesign helps to decide before even writing to us, and the one on which makes the budget of a redesign vary explains the elements to be specified for a quote.

After posting

After launch, we check redirects, titles, indexing instructions, the sitemap and the form. Search Console monitoring then shows indexing and changes in search queries. We agree the scope and duration of this monitoring with the firm, without guaranteeing rankings or indexing times.