Law firm website design tips for a site you already have

Almost every tip written for law firm sites tells a practice to add something. The 9 changes below remove or rewrite text that is already there, which is faster, cheaper and reversible. Each one is given as the line before and the line after, so nothing has to be interpreted.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

Why is a correction worth more than a redesign here?

Because the sentences are already costing money and a redesign does not change them.

A redesign moves the same words into a new layout. The homepage opener that says nothing still says nothing, in a better typeface. Meanwhile the corrections below take a paragraph each, need no developer for most of them, and can be undone by pasting the old text back.

There is a measured reason to start with the words rather than the layout. AI Overviews appear on 39 of 54 money searches in this market, and on 863 of 1,235 keywords across the whole set measured 3 August 2026. What gets quoted is text. A page whose first sentence is a greeting supplies nothing quotable, no matter how it is arranged.

The damaging admission: several of these you should do yourself in an afternoon and pay nobody for. The last section names which. We are not the cheapest way to change eight sentences, and a supplier who pretends otherwise is selling a project where an edit would do.

Which nine lines are wrong on most law firm sites?

Each row is a real pattern, with replacement text you can adapt rather than a principle to apply.

Rows 1, 3 and 5 are the same defect three times: the page opens by describing the firm to itself. Rows 2, 6 and 7 are the same defect from the other direction: the page withholds the thing the reader came to find.

What should the homepage first line actually say?

The practice areas, the county, and how to find out what it costs.

The opener in row 1 is doing one job — establishing longevity — and it is doing it to somebody who has not yet worked out whether they are on the right site. The replacement does three jobs in the same space, and it happens to be the text an answer engine can lift, because it contains facts rather than sentiment.

The county matters more than the state. Somebody looking for a divorce attorney is choosing partly on which courthouse the practice appears in. In Columbus, 4,000 people a month search in the family and divorce category and Google charges around $21.88 for one of those clicks, measured 3 August 2026 across 20 US cities. The demand figures treat family and divorce as one category, so that number covers both rather than divorce alone.

A hundred of those clicks bought at that price is $2,188 — arithmetic on two measured figures, not a forecast. It is the reason the first line is worth an afternoon: everything downstream of it is paid for either in money or in the slow work of ranking.

What is wrong with a practice area page that lists services?

It answers a question nobody asked and skips the three they did.

A list of services tells a reader what a firm is willing to be paid for. It does not tell them what happens next, what it costs, or whether their situation is the kind this practice takes. Of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches, 15 are price questions, measured 3 August 2026 — the single largest group, and the one a services list is guaranteed to miss.

The correction is structural but small: keep the list, move it below three answered questions. The order is the whole fix.

1. What this costs, or how it is charged. A firm that cannot state a figure can still state the method.
2. What happens in the first two weeks, in plain language.
3. Who at the practice handles it, by name.

What is missing from almost every contact page?

What happens after the form is sent.

A form with a submit button and no other text asks a stranger to hand over their situation and receive silence of unknown length. Row 4 replaces the silence with three facts: when calls are answered, what happens to an out-of-hours message, and that a person will reply. None of that is design work and all of it changes whether the form gets used.

Two related corrections belong on the same page. Put the phone number in as a link rather than an image, which is row 9 and takes a minute. And do not add a chat widget styled to look like a live person unless somebody is actually there — a promise of availability that is not kept is worse than no promise.

What should you do with a blog that stopped three years ago?

Remove the dates, fold the useful posts into practice area pages, or delete the section.

A visibly stalled news feed is one of the few things on a site that gets worse on its own. It publishes, on every visit, the fact that nobody has attended to this in a long time. There are three honest exits and no fourth: strip the dates and treat the posts as reference pages; merge the two or three that answer real questions into the practice area page they belong to; or delete the section and lose nothing.

What not to do is restart it. A weekly commitment made to fix a stale blog is a commitment that will be broken in public, on a page carrying a visible date.

Which of these should you do yourself, and which are worth paying for?

Six of the nine you should do yourself this week.

Rows 1, 3, 4, 5 and 8 are text changes inside whatever the site is built on, and row 9 is usually a single setting. Nobody should be invoiced for them. Rows 2, 6 and 7 are the ones where paying is defensible: navigation changes touch every page, a fees page is a piece of writing that has to be right, and title tags need to be decided across the site at once rather than one at a time.

Four of the suppliers ranking for advice like this were in the 40 we read in full on 3 August 2026.

One of the four published a price on the page as it stood that day. We do not publish what any of them charge — the figures our tooling collected mixed genuine fees with case values and fragments, and a wrong number against a named business is not worth the saving.

Our own: Practice Sprint $1,450, build tier $2,900. Fixed, published, no minimum term. Of the 40 suppliers read, 12 published a price at all, 5 showed only a range rather than a figure, 8 claimed a guarantee of some kind, and 1 offered work with no minimum term. We never charge per inquiry, per case or per matter — the charge is 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 we give no advice about any practice's own obligations.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026 — including several named on this page. 12 published a price. 1 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 corrections above are done and the problem is that nobody arrives: small law firm seo.

By city, where the practice is competing locally: law firm marketing boston, denver law firm marketing and law firm marketing charleston.

On the stalled news section specifically: law firm marketing blogs.

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