Your law firm website plays a crucial role in setting you apart from your competitors. Whilst you don’t want to scrimp on a new website, you do want to ensure you’re receiving good value for money.
In this guide, I’ve outlined everything you need to know about the cost of a law firm website design.
You’ll learn what you can expect to spend, the factors impacting the overall cost of a law firm website, and how to decide on the optimal budget for your needs.
What is the average cost of a law firm website?
So, how much does a law firm website cost?
The cost of a law firm website depends on your requirements. The most basic design could cost you less than £1000, whilst something much more sophisticated could comfortably reach six figures. Here’s an outline of what you can expect from a law firm website at different price ranges:
- Low-tier: £5000–£10,000
- Mid-tier: £10,000–£40,000
- Top-tier: £50,000-£250,000+
Several factors, including features and the level of sophistication, will influence the cost of your law firm website.
What factors affect the cost of a law firm website?
Most modern website designs perform several important functions. Law firms are complex businesses, often providing a broad range of different services whilst requiring website users to perform several steps before potentially becoming a client.
With that in mind, your website must offer everything you and your prospective clients need if you want to generate revenue and drive growth. This includes:
- Attracting the right people: The users you want visiting your website are those most likely to require your services.
- Setting the right impression: People immediately begin forming an opinion of your business as a whole from the moment they first visit your website.
- Showcasing your brand: Setting the right impression is more than just ensuring your website performs well. It’s also about showing who you are and why you’re better than your competitors.
- Tracking leads: Once users arrive, your website must allow you to track them efficiently from the beginning to the end of their journey.
Creating a website capable of meeting these goals involves an extensive process and several key features, all of which impact your law firm web design cost.
Planning
Any trusted law firm web design agency will take the time to understand your firm’s values, key services, and objectives, ensuring it meets the needs of both your team and web visitors.
Doing this requires extensive planning, involving several methods of internal and external research, such as:
- Surveys
- Analytics analysis
- Interviews
- User and buyer personas
- Branding analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Tech discovery session
- Information architecture
- CMS recommendations
- Website KPI report benchmarking
As mentioned, law firms often provide a wealth of services and sub-services, even if they’re a boutique firm specialising in a single practice area.
Creating a plan that effectively meets these complex needs inevitably takes time and contributes to the cost of your law firm website.
Content production and SEO
If you’re making a significant investment on your law firm web design, you want to ensure it can be easily found by your target audience on search engines.
Content production centred around SEO is an absolute must for this. It’s the process of creating and optimising content dedicated to users actively searching for the insights and services your firm offers.
The process involves several key stages, each of which takes significant time and resources to carry out.
Keyword research
Effective keyword research is the foundation of SEO for law firms. It involves identifying relevant search queries with reasonable traffic, helping you rank on search engines and reach web users actively searching for the services you offer.
In some cases, there may be hundreds or even thousands of search queries associated with your main service. It takes time and resources to first identify these terms before categorising them and deciding which are worth targeting.
You’ll then need to group these keywords into subtopics to develop a content strategy for your audience. Suddenly, you have an extensive, time-consuming task before any website content has been produced.
This inevitably contributes to the cost of a law firm website, but it’s an essential step to get right if you want to start your web design project on the right foot.
Service page creation:
Having conducted research, you may require assistance with planning the structure of your service pages and writing the content.
Many law firms have 50+ services and whilst you’ll want to follow a template to ensure there’s an element of consistency across your site, the content itself will need to be unique and highly relevant to each particular service.
If you do have 50 services and each page takes two to four hours, then you’re looking at 100-200 hours of work. Not to mention approval and content population once the website is built. It’s no small task.
It’s a huge effort, so having support from marketing professionals is a game-changer. At Contra, we create SEO optimised service page templates for your lawyers to work from, ensuring a formidable blend of SEO expertise and legal knowledge.
Content strategy:
Rather than producing content because you feel like you have to, your content should revolve around your key practice areas and popular, relevant target keywords, where possible.
Having planned thoroughly, we will have a clear idea about which of your services generates the majority of your revenue.
We will focus on these services, making them core pillar pages that other related pieces of content regularly link back to, helping to establish topic authority and boost search engine rankings for relevant queries.
These related pieces of content will likely include guides, articles, and other thought leadership that focus more closely on a particular subject within your broader service area.
SEO optimisation:
Law firm SEO should be a top priority when creating both service pages and thought leadership content. And it’s more than just keywords on your website.
At the foundational level, we can use the keywords we’ve identified in our research to optimise your law firm website content.
These keywords need to be threaded naturally throughout your content. Overpopulating your content with keywords (keyword stuffing) may harm your search rankings if Google believes your content is purely designed to manipulate its algorithm.
It’s also detrimental to user experience and the readability of your content, potentially causing people to quickly leave your site.
The structure of your content needs to be carefully considered, with headers featuring your main target keywords to clearly indicate to users and search engines what the content is about.
Similarly, backend features like meta titles and descriptions should also be optimised with your main target keyword to further help Google crawl, index, and rank each page.
We can also look at your current content and how pages should link for Google and other search engines to crawl your site and better understand and rank your content.
And we ensure your site is sound from a technical perspective, running technical audits and adding schema markup (basically labels of code that help Google understand your site better). For example, ‘LegalService’, ‘Author’ and ‘Article’.
We are more than happy to offer our services for content production and optimisation, but this is often priced separately because the cost can vary significantly depending on the number of pages required.
Additionally, producing content internally can also help increase your search engine rankings with Google placing greater emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT).
Your lawyers are the ones with the legal expertise. If insight comes directly from them, it shows Google the content is reliable and credible, helping to improve rankings.
Content migration
Even if you’re unhappy with your existing website, it may contain valuable content worth keeping and adapting.
Content migration is the process of transferring all this content, such as thought leadership pieces, over to your new website.
If you have lots of content you wish to keep, you may require a content audit to determine exactly which articles are worth migrating and optimising, and which aren’t. This is known as content pruning.
As part of your content audit, we can also examine the internal linking of content, helping to ensure articles are linking to the suitable service pages in order to improve authority and search rankings.
The more thought leadership content you have, the longer your audit and migration will likely take, impacting how much your law firm website will cost.
Design
In the eyes of your audience, your website design is key in setting you apart from competitors.
At Contra, we create fully bespoke websites rather than building over basic templates like some other agencies.
The best law firm websites are truly unique and designed for the firm’s specific needs.
The process of crafting a bespoke website involves creating wireframes to provide a clear idea of the layout and structure.
This is particularly important for law firms offering a wealth of services dedicated to both individuals and businesses across various sectors.
All these service pages need to be organised logically and in a way that is easily navigable for your audience.
The design stage also involves producing a design system, essentially a document detailing all the elements of your design, including fonts, use of colours, use of buttons, and more.
A design system helps to ensure a consistent and professional appearance which is vital for any law firm.
Finally, a website component document will be produced detailing all the components and their functionality.
Generally, the more components involved, the more complex the website build, requiring more time and budget.
Build
The build stage is where we bring the design for your law firm website to life.
As part of the process, we carry out Quality Assurance, ensuring everything performs to the expected standard.
Given that law firms are complex, your website may require several sophisticated integrations to help you carry out the day-to-day running as efficiently as possible.
These integrations will depend entirely on your specific requirements but may include a client portal, a matter management system, forms, and a CRM like HubSpot, among other things.
For law firms offering a diverse range of information, subsites may also be required to divide and organise content, offering a more structured experience.
The complexity doesn’t end there. Utilising microinteractions (subtle animations when you interact) across your site is an effective way to make it feel more engaging and unique, enhancing user experience.
If you want to offer the same optimal experience for users in other countries, it’s likely you’ll require multi-language features on your site too.
Implementing complex integrations, microinteractions, multi-language, and subsites all lead to a higher overall cost for your law firm website.
Ongoing support
A new law firm website isn’t worth the investment if it stops being useful after an update or a change in your firm’s needs.
To avoid this issue, we often agree on a monthly retainer budget with our legal clients for improvements should they be required.
Additionally, a separate budget may be agreed for handling ongoing maintenance, which typically includes:
- Monthly required security updates (security is a top priority for law firms).
- Server backups
- Monitoring downtime
- Managing any issues or requests
- Monitoring analytics, SEO, and advertising performance. Producing monthly reports with findings and recommendations for future optimisations.
- Hosting support
It’s important to factor in these ongoing expenses when thinking about exactly how much your new law firm website is likely to cost.
Deciding on a budget for your law firm website.
Now you have a better understanding of all the factors that contribute to the cost of a law firm website, but you’re probably still unsure of exactly what you can expect to spend, given the cost can vary significantly from site to site.
The overall price depends entirely on the size of your law firm and its requirements.
A global firm will likely have more complex needs and inevitably face a greater cost than a local firm.
It’s essential you identify the law firm web design agency best suited to your firm’s requirements and budget.
A large agency might have more resources but might not view your project as a priority if they’re working with much larger clients, whilst being very expensive.
Meanwhile, a smaller agency possesses individual expertise and may value you more as a client, but their resources might be too stretched to do a good job.
They’re likely to be less expensive than a large agency, but in many cases, you get what you pay for. If the price is very low then the quality of your website may not be satisfactory.
Often, a mid-tier agency like Contra provides the best solution, utilising established processes and a large enough team to meet your needs without undervaluing your project.
With Contra, there is no B team. Senior members with a wealth of expertise in law and professional services will be directly involved in your website project.
We can effectively tackle projects of varying sizes, with legal clients spanning from large multinationals such as KMPG and Hexagon AB to small, boutique law firms.
Need a law firm web design agency?
We specialise in creating law firm websites dedicated to the unique needs of your firm, whilst offering great value for money.
Our legal web design clients include Hudgell Solicitors, Magrath Sheldrick, and more. Find out how we can help drive your law firm’s growth with a bespoke website build by requesting a free consultation.
