11 Tips For Effective Law Firm Website Development

These days it’s not enough to have great lawyers on the team, law firms are also competing to build their online presence. 34% of consumers use a search engine when finding an attorney for their legal needs.

Hence, a law firm needs the best website to build brand awareness, attract prospects, and generate leads. They also require a skilled developer to make that possible.

As we have experience developing many law firm websites, we understand what it takes to develop a good one that brings leads to the table. And here we’ve listed a few tips to consider while developing a law firm website.

1. Make Your Navigation Easier

The navigation bar makes it easier for visitors to explore your website. All of the important pages should be added to the navigation.

Make sure all the navigation titles and links should be clearly visible and work perfectly to ensure visitor lands on the correct page. You should also create an HTML sitemap and link it to the footer.

Practice area pages are the most valuable pages for the law firm’s website. A typical navigation menu must have a list of practice areas accessible with a drop-down menu.

However, there are also other pages you should add to the navigation for law website development. Check it out:-

• Home
• Attorneys
  • Attorney 1
  • Attorney 2
  • Attorney 3
• Practice areas
  • Practice sub item 1
  • Practice sub item 2
  • Practice sub item 3
  • Practice sub item 4
• Blog/News
• Testimonials
• Contact

Here’s an example of what it should look like on the front-end.

2. Add Reviews and Testimonials

Most law firms showcase their past results on their website. Apart from that adding Reviews and testimonials also helps to build trust among their clients.

While developing a law firm website, you should gather reviews from their Google Business Profile, social media, listings, and other classifieds. Add a review section on the home page and practice area pages and highlight that section.

You can also use google maps iframe for the review and update dynamically on the website, that way you don’t need to manually update reviews on the website.

3. Mention Practice Areas on the Homepage

When a visitor lands on a law firm’s website, they are searching for an attorney who will help them with a specific legal issue. That’s where the ‘Practice Areas’ section comes into the picture.

You should build a separate page for each practice area to cover their specific legal services, and what they have to offer.

It is crucial to add a section on the homepage to highlight all the ‘Practice Areas’. Along with writing relevant content, you should also add a CTA button that leads to a specific service page.

If there are many legal services, then we can display the main practice areas in the section and we can add a CTA button at the bottom of the section to read more practice areas.

4. Display Honors and Badges Earned

We suggest our clients add badges on their websites, badges are an indication of ‘honor’, ‘achievement’, or ‘community’. It makes visitors believe that they’re being served by credible attornies.

You should add a section to add badges on the homepage and practice area pages. You can also add specific badges earned on attorney introduction pages.

Here’s an example of badges,

Basically, The honors and badges are also important to consider while developing a law firm website.

When using any third-party badges on the law firm website, do not forget to add a ’No-Follow’ link to the badge website, so that visitors can click and check the original badge website to verify it.

5. Blog Section for Law Firm Website

Blog posts on a website can rank more prominently in search engine results and improve visibility to attract relevant traffic to law firm websites.

The blog section of the law firm’s website enables lawyers to educate their clients and establish legal expertise. It also gives a platform to build brand awareness.

While developing a law firm website, make sure the blog section is accessible to visitors by linking it to the header and footer navigation. You can also add a section for ‘Recent Blog Posts’ on the home page to grab the attention of the visitor.

On the blog listing page, you can add the sidebar of the categories, archives, and recent posts. The sidebar makes it easier for users to learn about the topic categories, navigate to old blogs, and explore the blog. These are to most powerful objects for the blogs so don’t forget to add them to the blog list page.

6. Keep Your Attorney Bios Up-To-Date

Attorney Bio pages with a professional photo of each lawyer of the firm can make a good impression on visitors. You should add a separate page for each attorney to provide all the details to the visitor.

A typical attorney bio page must have the following details:

• Name and designation of lawyers (Obviously!)
• Specialization of service
• Qualification along with the name of the university
• Work Experience in years
• Introduction
• Achievements
• A good professional photo

Attorney bio pages should also be easily accessible to visitors. Make sure to link them in the navigation and homepage.

7. Contact Form at the Bottom

Now, you already know the reason behind building a website for a law firm right? To attract new visitors. And how these visitors can contact the attorneys? (You guessed it right!) by using the contact form on the website.

When you display the contact form at the bottom of each page, visitors don’t have to go to the ‘contact-us’ page. You can also add a clickable contact number, as shown in the following image.

However, You should also add the contact form on each inner page using the sidebar. It allows users to submit the form at any time from any page.

8. Use Sidebar on Each Page

Adding a sidebar on the law firm’s website opens many opportunities:

• Include information that might not otherwise fit.
• Allows to add CTAs without disrupting the page content.
• List Practise Areas to display areas of expertise.
• Share social media feeds.
• Can add testimonials as well.
• Improve the navigation of the blog by including recent post links, categories, tags, RSS subscription forms, search boxes, and more.

Example 1: Sidebar on ‘Practise Area’ Page

Example 2: Sidebar for blogs

9. Fix Mobile Bar Easy to Access

When you develop a website for a law firm, ensure that the site is optimized for mobile devices. Mobile phones take up 58.57% of total browser usage across the world, that’s the utmost reason to give a better user experience on mobile devices.

For mobile devices, you will have a small screen size to cover everything. Here users should be able to all the important details without having to scroll too much. Don’t worry we’ve got you covered!

As shown in the picture below, you can add a fixed mobile bar for all the pages:

The mobile fix bar is very easy and helpful for users to check all the details related to the law firm. Like search options, phone numbers, contact pages, attorney page details, practice area pages, etc. You can add, delete and modify accordingly as per the requirement.

10. Google reCAPTCHA to Avoid Spam Emails

You should use Google reCAPTCHA for the contact forms, to avoid spam emails and fake entries on the law firm’s website.

reCAPTCHA prevents any spam or bots from entering data into contact forms on the website. This includes fake comments on posts, contact form entries, and fake registration submissions.

reCAPTCHA is owned by Google. It uses advanced techniques, with the latest version being able to filter out suspicious visitors without the need for a manual puzzle to be solved. They look through the history of entering reCAPTCHA using the IP address and offer clues that can determine whether the visitor is a bot or not.

Moreover, If you are developing a WordPress website then you can use the plugins as well. There are two types reCAPTCHA v2 and reCAPTCHA v3. 

11. Add Location Pages

If the law firm is operating at multiple locations, you should create a separate landing page for each location.

The main purpose behind building location pages is to attract a local audience and build brand awareness. Make sure to add the following:

• Add local contact number and make sure it is clickable
• Integrate Google Business Profile in the footer
• Add local address as well
• Add the contact form in the footer
• Mention operating hours
• You can also add multiple locations as shown below

Additional Tips for Law Firm Web Development

Once the website development part is done, there are also a few more checkpoints that you should cover. Follow these steps, and you’ll be well on your way:

A. Don’t Forget the SEO

Whenever you add content to the website there are a few basic SEO checks that you can perform:

• Title: Each page should have a unique specific title.
• Meta Description: All the important pages should have meta descriptions.
• H1 Tag: Ensure every page has heading tags.
• Links: Make sure all the links are working fine.
• Alt-text: give alt-text here.

The law industry is very competitive, hence optimizing the website with help of Local SEO will help to gain more local audiences.

Learn more about our white-label SEO offerings!

B. Optimize Your Website to Load Fast

Every element on the page increases your page loading time. When page-loading time is high, users might leave the page at any moment!

Make sure you compress all the images and other files when you’re uploading them. Also, you should compress all the JS and CSS. For speed optimization of a WordPress website, you can use plugins as well.

C. Change Website Admin URL for Protection

It’s easier to access the admin URL for a WordPress website, which means it should be protected from harmful login attempts.

We highly recommend changing the URL to something unique or even protecting the existing URL. Also, there are so many scripts and plugins available to change the website URL.

Conclusion:

As the legal industry keeps growing, the demand for high-conversion websites is also increasing. I hope these tips added value to your knowledge. If you need our help in creating a solid website for a law firm, explore our development services.