Most law firm websites are not badly designed. They are competently designed and commercially inert — a photograph of a glass building, a list of practice areas, a contact form, and no particular reason to choose this firm over the one three doors down with an almost identical site.
That is the actual problem with legal web design. Not aesthetics. The absence of anything that helps a worried person decide.
Who Is Actually on the Site
A useful design brief starts with the honest answer to this, and it is rarely "a general business audience".
Someone looking for a solicitor is usually in the middle of something: a purchase falling through, a relationship ending, a dispute with an employer, a death in the family, a business problem with a deadline. They are not browsing. They are anxious, often under time pressure, frequently doing this for the first time, and they are comparing two or three firms in a single sitting.
What that person needs is specific: do you do my exact thing, have you done it before for someone like me, what will it cost, how quickly can I speak to a human, and can I trust you.
Most legal sites answer the first question and skip the rest. The firms that win online tend to be the ones that answer all five on the page, before the enquiry.
Structure: One Page Per Thing You Actually Want
The single biggest structural failure in legal web design is the practice area page that covers everything.
A "Family Law" page listing divorce, financial settlements, children arrangements, cohabitation disputes and prenuptial agreements is competing for all of those terms and winning none of them, because it says four sentences about each. Meanwhile the person searching for one of them specifically — which is how people actually search — finds a page that mentions their problem in passing.
The fix is more pages, each genuinely about one thing. A proper page on financial settlements on divorce, written for someone facing one, will outperform a department overview permanently. The same applies to conveyancing: leasehold, new build, shared ownership, remortgage and transfer of equity are different worries with different questions, and lumping them together serves none of them.
This has a cost. More pages means more content, and content is where legal web projects stall, because the people who can write it authoritatively are billing by the hour. Any agency that proposes forty practice pages without addressing who writes them is selling you a backlog.
Trust Signals Lawyers Already Have and Do Not Use
Legal is a sector where credentials are abundant and underused. The things that reassure a nervous client are usually sitting in the firm's filing cabinet.
- Named people with real biographies. Not a staff grid of headshots with job titles. Who they are, what they have handled, how long they have done it, what they are accredited in. This is also the single strongest thing you can do for how search engines assess expertise on a page about a sensitive topic.
- Regulatory detail, stated plainly. SRA number, firm name as registered, which bodies you belong to. Required anyway, and genuinely reassuring when displayed rather than buried in a footer.
- Accreditations that mean something. Lexcel, specialist panels, law society accreditations. Use the ones you actually hold and skip the generic badges.
- Testimonials attached to a matter type. "Excellent service" from Anon helps nobody. A client describing what the firm did on a specific kind of case, within what the SRA permits, is worth twenty of them.
- Written costs information. Price transparency rules already require significant disclosure for several work types. Firms that treat this as a compliance chore bury it; firms that treat it as a selling point put it on the page and win the enquiry from the person who was afraid to ask.
Compliance Is a Design Constraint, Not an Afterthought
Legal marketing operates inside rules, and discovering them at sign-off is expensive.
Price transparency requirements, the way you may describe outcomes, the handling of testimonials, mandatory firm information, complaints procedure visibility and the way regulated and unregulated services are distinguished all affect what goes on the page and how. None of this is onerous once it is in the brief. All of it is painful if the design is finished first and compliance reviews it afterwards.
Practically: get whoever is responsible for compliance into the project early, as a contributor rather than a gate. A good agency will ask about this unprompted. An agency that has never built for a regulated sector will not, and you will do the work for them.
The Enquiry Journey Nobody Tests
A striking number of legal websites make it hard to make contact in the way the client wants.
The patterns worth checking on your own site, today:
- Is the phone number clickable on a phone? Many are images or plain text. Someone on a mobile, mid-crisis, should not be copying digits.
- Does the form ask for more than a first contact needs? Every extra field loses enquiries. Name, contact, matter type, a free-text box. You can qualify afterwards.
- Does the form say what happens next? "We will call you within one working day" converts better than a silent submit, and it is a promise you can actually keep.
- Does anything acknowledge confidentiality? A line stating that an enquiry is confidential and without obligation addresses a real fear, particularly in family and employment work.
- Is there a route for someone who cannot call? Employment and family clients often cannot talk freely from work or home. A form or a callback window is not a nice-to-have for them.
And then the part that is not design at all: how fast does the firm respond? The best website in the sector loses to the firm that answers the phone. If enquiries sit in an inbox until someone is between matters, fix that before the website.
Does the Site Need to Be Fast and Findable Too?
Yes, and this is where design decisions have consequences long after launch.
Heavy image-led designs, sliders and embedded video on a page someone opens on mobile data cost you both impatient visitors and ranking signals. A site built so that content only appears after JavaScript runs risks not being read properly by search engines at all. Neither trade-off is worth making for a hero carousel.
Being findable locally matters as much for legal as for any local service — a great many legal searches carry a town or city in them, and for those the Maps result is doing a lot of work. We've covered that specifically in how to rank on Google Maps as a solicitor.
Choosing Who Builds It
The sector-specific things worth asking, beyond the usual questions in how to choose a web design agency:
- Have you built for a regulated profession, and what did compliance change about the design?
- Who writes the practice area content, and what happens if our fee earners do not have time?
- How will the site handle one page per matter type rather than one per department?
- What happens to our existing rankings when we migrate? A redesign that loses the traffic you already had is a common and expensive outcome.
That last one matters more than most firms realise at the point of signing.
If you want to see how we approach it, our web design and legal sector SEO pages set out what we do and the sort of work it involves. The short version: for a law firm the website is not a brochure, it is the first conversation — and most of them are having a worse first conversation than the firm would have in person.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a good law firm website?
One that answers the five things a worried client actually needs: whether you handle their exact matter, whether you have done it before, what it is likely to cost, how fast they can speak to someone, and why they should trust you. Most legal sites answer only the first.
Should solicitors have one page per practice area or per service?
Per service. A single family law page covering divorce, settlements and children arrangements competes for all of them and ranks for none, because it gives each a few sentences. A page written properly for one matter type, for someone facing it, performs far better and keeps performing.
What compliance issues affect law firm web design?
Price transparency requirements, how outcomes may be described, the handling of testimonials, mandatory firm and regulatory information, and complaints procedure visibility. None are difficult if they are in the brief from the start; all are expensive if compliance first sees the site at sign-off.
How do I find a good web designer for a law firm?
Ask whether they have built for a regulated profession and what compliance changed about the design, who writes the practice area content, how they will structure pages per matter type, and specifically how they protect existing search rankings through the migration.
Will redesigning our website lose our Google rankings?
It can, and it frequently does when redirects, page structure and content parity are handled after launch rather than planned before. Ask any prospective agency to explain their migration process in detail — a firm that cannot describe it is the risk, not the redesign itself.