A law firm website has two halves. One half is regulated: there is information you are required to publish, and the rules are specific about where it goes and what it says. The other half is an ordinary marketing problem, which is getting the right enquiry to the right fee earner without wasting anybody's morning.
Most firm websites are respectable on the first half and poor on the second. This is what belongs on a solicitor's site, in what order, and how to handle the enquiry so it arrives with enough information to be useful. None of what follows is legal or compliance advice, and the rules change, so check the current position directly with the SRA rather than with a web designer.
What are you actually required to publish?
For firms regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in England and Wales, the transparency rules cover price and service information for a defined list of work, which has included things like residential conveyancing, uncontested probate, motoring offences, employment tribunal claims for unfair dismissal, immigration work, debt recovery and licensing applications. If you do any of that for individuals or small businesses, the price information is not optional.
Alongside it sit the other required pieces: your complaints procedure and how to escalate to the Legal Ombudsman, your regulatory information and SRA number, and the SRA's digital badge. Details change, and the rules differ for firms regulated by other bodies and in other UK jurisdictions, so take this as a prompt to check rather than as the list itself.
The practical point for the website is that this content is not a footer afterthought. Price and service information has to be prominent and easy to find, which means it needs a proper page, linked from the main navigation, not a PDF buried three clicks down.
Who is reading, and what state are they in?
Legal enquiries arrive from people at a bad moment, which changes how the site should read.
- Somebody bereaved, trying to work out what probate involves and what it will cost, often on behalf of a family who are all watching.
- Somebody buying or selling a house, price sensitive, comparing three firms, and mostly wanting to know your fee and how quickly you respond.
- Somebody in an employment dispute, worried, possibly reading at eleven at night, unsure whether they even have a case.
- A business client, who wants to see that you have done this before for a business their size, and who is judging you on precision.
These people do not want a stock photograph of a gavel, which is American anyway. They want plain sentences, a named human being, a figure or a range, and a way to ask a question without feeling committed.
Practice area pages are most of the site
Almost all useful traffic to a law firm site lands on a practice area page, not the homepage. That means one page per area of work, written for a client rather than for a colleague, is the single highest value thing on the site.
A good practice area page answers, in this order: what this area of work covers in plain words, what the process looks like step by step, roughly how long it takes, what it costs or what drives the cost, who in the firm does it, and what to do next. If the same page also explains the two or three things clients always get wrong about that area, it will do a great deal of work for you.
Put a named solicitor on every practice area page, with a photograph and a direct line if you can. People instruct people, not departments, and a page with a face on it converts noticeably better than one signed by the firm.
Split by what people search, not by how the firm is organised. "Wills and probate" is one department and two searches. "Divorce", "child arrangements" and "financial settlement" are one team and three pages. The firm's internal structure is not interesting to a member of the public.
How should a firm present fees?
Beyond what you are required to publish, the choice is how much further to go, and firms that go further tend to get better enquiries rather than worse ones. The people who are only price shopping filter themselves out, and the people who do ring have already accepted the number.
- Fixed fees where you use them, with what is included and what is not stated in the same breath.
- Hourly rates by grade, if that is how the work is charged, and an honest estimate of hours for common matters.
- Disbursements listed separately and explained, because a client who is surprised by a search fee remembers it.
- Whether the figures include VAT, stated explicitly on every price, which is a requirement for consumer facing pricing rather than a nicety.
- The date the pricing was last reviewed.
Getting the enquiry to the right place
This is where most firm websites quietly lose money. A single "contact us" form that goes to a shared inbox means somebody has to read it, work out which department it is for, forward it, and hope. Two days later a conveyancing enquiry gets a reply and has already instructed somebody else.
Do three things instead.
- Put a form on each practice area page, pre set to that area, so the enquiry arrives labelled.
- Ask the two or three questions that matter for that work. For conveyancing: buying, selling or both, is it leasehold, and is there a chain. For employment: are you still employed and is there a deadline approaching. Those answers turn a call back into a useful one.
- Say what happens next and when. "We answer enquiries the same working day" is a promise you have to keep, so say something you can keep. A lot of firms would win more work by answering faster than by redesigning anything.
It is also worth deciding what happens to an enquiry that arrives at ten past five on a Friday. If the honest answer is Monday morning, say so on the page rather than leaving somebody waiting and assuming they have been ignored. An automatic acknowledgement that says when a human will reply costs nothing and prevents a good number of second enquiries to your competitors over the weekend.
Keep the phone number obvious throughout. A significant share of legal enquiries, particularly from older clients and from anybody in distress, will be a phone call and nothing else.
What about people wanting free advice?
The fear behind a lot of thin law firm websites is that explaining too much invites unpaid questions. In practice the opposite happens. A page that explains the process properly attracts people who understand what they are buying, and deters the ones who were hoping for a free answer, because they can see there is a process rather than a quick reply.
What does help is being explicit about the boundary: "The information on this page is general and is not legal advice on your situation. The first step is a short call, which costs nothing, to work out whether we can help and what it would cost." That sentence, on every practice area page, sets expectations and reduces the awkward calls rather than increasing them.
Write it so a client can actually read it
The most common failing on law firm websites is not compliance, it is that the pages are written for other lawyers. Latin, statute references, sentences with four subordinate clauses, and the phrase "in the event that" where "if" would do.
Three habits fix nearly all of it. Use the client's word rather than the profession's: "divorce" not "matrimonial proceedings", "will" not "testamentary instrument". Put the answer first and the qualification after, rather than four lines of caveat before the point. And read every page aloud before it goes live, because anything you would not say to a client across a desk should not be on the page.
This is not dumbing anything down. A page that a worried person can understand at eleven at night is a better piece of professional communication than one that demonstrates how much you know, and it converts far better. There is a practical method in writing the words for your own website.
Getting a firm found
Legal search is competitive and a lot of money is spent on it, so be realistic about where a small firm can win. Broad terms are contested by national brands and comparison sites, and you are not going to outspend them.
What is winnable is local and specific. The town plus the practice area, the niche you genuinely do more of than anyone nearby, and the questions clients ask that nobody has written a straight answer to. That plus a properly maintained Google Business Profile, which is covered in getting found on Google when you only work locally, is where a high street firm's realistic gains are.
Write the pages in the words clients use. People search "someone to sort out my mum's estate" long before they search "grant of probate", and the firm that has written a human sentence about that is the one they find.
What should a law firm website cost?
Technically it is a brochure site, so the build should not be exotic. A freelancer or small studio in the UK will usually quote £1,500 to £5,000 for a firm with a decent number of practice area pages, and legal specialist agencies a good deal more, normally because content and marketing are bundled in.
Two things genuinely add cost here. Volume of content, because ten practice areas written properly is a lot of writing, and compliance review, because somebody in the firm has to read every page and that takes partner time. Budget for the second even when nobody quotes for it.
On a rental, a small firm usually lands in the ten page bracket, which with us is £149 a month excluding VAT, with the first three months paid up front and no setup fee. One design revision comes with the build, content changes are unlimited and free, which matters when pricing pages have to be kept current, and hosting, SSL, business email and a yearly redesign are included.
If you want to work out your own number before speaking to anybody, there is a method in work out what your website should cost before you ask, and the four UK price bands are explained in why UK website quotes vary so much.
The short version
Publish what you are required to publish, prominently and accurately, and check it against the current rules yourself rather than trusting a template. Then write one honest page per practice area, put a named person on each, route the enquiry to them directly, and answer quickly. That combination beats a handsome site with a shared inbox every time.
