Law firm website design cost: the three things that move it

Three things drive the number, and design is not one of them: how many pages get built, who writes the words, and who owns the result. Our build tier is $2,900 and the Practice Sprint is $1,450, both published. Of 40 suppliers read on 3 August 2026, twelve published a price.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

Why can nobody quote you a market average?

Because 28 of the 40 suppliers we read published no price at all.

That is a finding rather than a complaint. On 3 August 2026 we read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full and checked whether each stated a price on the page as published. Twelve did. Five of those twelve showed only a range rather than a figure. Eight claimed a guarantee of some kind and one offered work with no minimum term.

A market where seven in ten sellers publish nothing does not have a public average, and any page quoting you one has either surveyed something it is not naming or made it up. We are not going to do either. What can be done honestly is to name what moves the number, so that two quotes with a large gap between them can be read rather than guessed at.

The damaging admission, early: this page cannot tell you what your quote should be. It can tell you which three questions make a quote comparable to another quote, and that is a smaller thing than the search implies.

What actually drives the number?

Three variables, and they compound.

Everything else a quote itemizes — layout, color, photography direction, revision rounds — moves the total far less than any one of these three, and is the part most conversations spend their time on.

How much does page count change it?

More than any other single variable, because a page is the unit the work is actually done in.

A firm wanting two practice areas, three fee earners and one office needs roughly ten pages: home, two practice-area pages, a costs page, three people pages, a location page, a contact page, and a page describing what happens in the first two weeks. A firm with five practice areas, eight fee earners and three offices needs closer to twenty-five. The second is not a slightly larger version of the first — it is two and a half times the writing, the review and the sign-off.

This is why a quote without a page count is not a quote. Two suppliers can name figures a long way apart and both be reasonable, because one has priced ten pages and the other twenty-five, and neither said so.

Ask for the number in writing, and ask what counts as a page. A practice-area grid on the homepage is one page. Five practice-area pages are five, and they are the ones that match the searches.

Who writes the copy, and what does that add?

The most commonly transferred cost, and the one that stalls the project.

Most website quotes assume the firm supplies the words. That assumption is reasonable, cheap and, in a law firm, usually wrong — not because nobody can write, but because the people who can are billing. A costs page needs a partner to decide what the firm is willing to publish. A practice-area page needs somebody who does the work to describe it.

The result is predictable: the layout arrives in weeks and the site publishes months later, waiting on copy. The cost did not go up on the invoice; it went up in the calendar, and in the fee earner hours spent producing text at a rate far above what writing costs to buy.

Two things worth settling before signing:

• Who produces the first draft of each page, named by page rather than by project.
• What happens if the firm's draft does not arrive. A supplier who has never answered this has not run into it, which is itself information.

In our case the writing is included — a cost we carry rather than one the firm discovers later, and a reason our number sits above a layout-only quote.

Who owns the result, and why does that change the price you should accept?

Because a low monthly figure and a purchase are not the same transaction.

A site the firm cannot take elsewhere is a subscription with a design attached. That can be a perfectly sensible arrangement, and it is frequently the cheapest way to have something live this quarter. What it is not is ownership, and the two are compared as if they were the same thing on almost every shortlist.

The question worth sending in writing, before any money moves: after final payment, who owns the site files, the content, the domain and the analytics account, and if we leave, what comes with us? A plain sentence naming the firm is the only clean answer. Anything conditional means the answer is no, and the cost of that answer arrives years later, when new URLs discard whatever the old ones had earned.

What we would say if asked: the firm owns the site, the content, the domain and the analytics, and it can be moved. We would rather write that here than be asked for it.

Which suppliers tell you the price before you call?

Twelve of 40, and the four we name here split three to one.

clio.com, digitalagencynetwork.com and onthemap.com each published a price on the page when we read them on 3 August 2026. deckerdesign.com did not. We record which pages carried a figure, never what the figure was, because our tooling picked up case values and half-sentences alongside genuine fees, and a wrong number attached to a named business is not a mistake worth making.

Where they beat us. If the firm wants a design studio with a legal portfolio and a bespoke process rather than a fixed published figure, deckerdesign.com is that kind of supplier and we are not — and a firm that would rather discuss scope before seeing a number is not badly served by a supplier who works that way. clio.com has run the same advertisements for 367 and 366 days selling a downloadable document, which is a longer continuous test of what this audience responds to than anything we have run. And digitalagencynetwork.com lists many suppliers at once, which is a faster way to assemble a shortlist than reading one supplier's site.

Separately, 15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions — the largest single group. It is the most-asked question in this market and the one seven in ten sellers do not answer.

What do we charge, and where are we the wrong answer?

Practice Sprint $1,450, build tier $2,900. Fixed, published, no minimum term, writing included.

We decline the guarantee that eight of the 40 suppliers offer, because nobody controls Google's ranking. We never charge per inquiry, per case or per matter — we charge for the work, by scope and time. Lawyer advertising in the United States runs through ABA Model Rule 7.2(b), adopted differently state by state, and a firm's own advertising obligations are a matter for that firm and its own advisers.

We are the wrong answer for a firm that needs something live this week, for a firm whose page set is genuinely twenty-five pages and growing, and for a firm that wants a design process with several presented directions. All three exist, all three are legitimate, and none of them are what a fixed published figure is for.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026, including several named on this page. Twelve published a price. One offered work with no minimum term.

The free report gives you the full count, named, so you can repeat it rather than take ours. It also shows how many people search for your practice areas in your town, and what those clicks cost to buy at Google's own prices.

Get the report — five questions, about two minutes →

No call required. Our own prices are on that page.

Where should I read next?

If the question is what the search work costs rather than the build: law firm SEO strategy.

On how this market talks about itself: law firm marketing strategies com and law firm SEO coalition.

If you are gathering supplier names in person: law firm marketing association and law firm marketing conference.

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