Small law firm website design for a firm with no owner

A small firm's site has one constraint a large firm's does not: nobody owns it. Build fewer pages, leave out everything that needs feeding, and keep the one page that goes stale editable in five minutes. Our Firm Site is £2,400 and the price pack £890.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What does being small actually change about the build?

Not the budget. The absence of anybody whose job it is to look after the result.

In a firm of two or three fee earners there is no marketing manager, no content calendar and no weekly half hour where somebody opens the site and checks it. The people who could write are the people billing, and everything the site needs from them competes with matters that pay. That is the real constraint and almost no supplier prices for it.

A build that ignores it produces a familiar object: a handsome site, launched, then untouched. Two years later it lists a fee earner who left, quotes a fee that changed, and links to a form that stopped delivering when the mailbox moved. None of that is a design failure. It is a maintenance assumption nobody wrote down.

So the design question for a small firm is not what it can afford. It is what will still be true in three years without anybody doing anything, and everything else should be argued out of the build.

The damaging admission, early: we do not maintain sites for firms that have not bought a retainer, and a fixed-price build hands over an object that will drift. We would rather design for the drift than pretend somebody will prevent it.

What should a small firm deliberately leave out?

Six things that are standard on a proposal and are liabilities without somebody to feed them.

None of those are bad ideas in a firm with somebody running them. In a firm without one they convert into visible neglect, which is a worse signal than never having had the feature.

The general rule is short enough to hold in a meeting: if it has to be fed, do not build it. Anything that looks stale within a year of nobody touching it is a decision to be made again later, not a launch item.

What is the smallest set of pages that still does the job?

The ones a stranger needs and the ones a firm in England and Wales is expected to publish, and nothing beyond either.

That means a home page, one page for each practice area the firm actually wants more of, a page of price and service information for whichever of the firm's services the price rules cover, a complaints page, a page per fee earner, and one contact page. The SRA Transparency Rules have asked for the price and service information since 6 December 2018, checked 3 August 2026, and whether a given firm meets its obligations is a judgement for the firm and its COLP — we build the pages, we do not certify anything.

A firm with two fee earners and two practice areas lands somewhere near eight pages on that basis. That is a worked illustration rather than a rule, and the point of it is the direction of travel: the number should be argued downwards, because each page is something that can go out of date.

Two pages that get built and should not be: an "our values" page, which nobody searches for, and a services index that only repeats the navigation. Both survive proposals because they are easy to produce.

What rots when nobody maintains the site, and which page has to stay editable?

Five things rot on a predictable schedule. One of them is the page that matters most.

• People pages, when somebody leaves. The commonest visibly wrong item on a small firm's site.
• Published fee information, when the fee changes and the page does not.
• The contact route, when an address or mailbox moves and the form quietly stops delivering.
• Third-party embeds — maps, review widgets, calendars — which change their own terms and break without warning.
• The certificate and the platform underneath, which need attention on their own timetable regardless of what the firm is doing.

The second item is the one to design for. Fee information is the page a firm has a separate reason to keep current, and it is also the answer to the most-asked question in this market: 15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions, measured 3 August 2026, and only 12 of the 40 suppliers we read that day published a price at all.

So build that page to be edited by a person who is not technical, in about five minutes, without ringing anybody. Name that person before handover. A fee page that requires a support ticket is a fee page that stays wrong.

Where does the demand sit in a smaller town?

In the practice areas people move house and family over, rather than in the ones with the dramatic click prices.

Measured 3 August 2026 across 20 UK cities. The right-hand column is arithmetic — searches multiplied by cost per click — and is what a month of that traffic would cost to buy at Google's own prices. It is not revenue and not a projection of instructions.

The useful comparison is against the same towns' injury figures, which are far smaller: Norwich records 30 injury searches a month and Coventry 20. A small firm choosing which two practice-area pages to build well should build them where the searching is, and in most British towns that is conveyancing and family work.

Which of these suppliers publish a price?

One of the four named here, on the day we checked.

Across all 40 suppliers read in full that day:

⚠ The benchmark records presence, not amount. No fee is attributed to any named business anywhere in this programme, because the tooling that read those pages picked up case values and fragments alongside genuine fees.

Ours, for the same reason we ask it of others: Price Transparency Pack £890 over ten working days, Firm Site £2,400, Firm Site+ £4,200, Authority Build £6,900, retainers at £600, £1,200 or £2,400 a month with no minimum term, and £700 off a build taken with six months of retainer. Nothing is priced per enquiry, lead or matter — LASPO 2012 section 56 makes referral fees in prescribed legal business a problem for the paying firm as much as for the party paid.

Where is another supplier the better choice?

Three cases, and two of them are about what a small firm is really buying.

dribbble.com is where to look when the firm wants to see visual directions before commissioning anything. It is a gallery rather than a supplier, it publishes no price because there is nothing to price, and an hour there settles more taste arguments than a discovery meeting will.

paperstreet.com publishes a price and runs a design-led practice. A firm that wants a distinctive look and has somebody willing to sit through a design process is not badly served there, and we are the narrower purchase.

attorneyatlawmagazine.com and mltdigital.co.uk are worth reading rather than retaining if what the firm actually needs is to understand the market before spending. Neither published a price when we read them, which is ordinary for a publication and for a full-service agency respectively.

We cannot promise a ranking and neither can anybody else, and we do not manage ad spend. If the firm needs enquiries this quarter, a build is the wrong purchase.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026 — including several 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 next question is the number rather than the shape: law firm website design cost, and for what actually arrives, law firm website design services.

Once the site is built and the question is being found: law firm SEO marketing.

For the wider spend rather than the site alone: law firm marketing services. If the practice area is injury work specifically: personal injury law firm SEO.

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