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Without regular website maintenance, even a perfectly designed website will slow down and accumulate errors, faulty plugins, broken links, and outdated content.
It’s a recipe for gradually turning visitors away.
And yet, maintenance is a daunting task with 51% of law firms claiming optimizing websites is their biggest marketing challenge. As a legal professional, you know full well that website maintenance and optimization aren’t your cup of tea, especially when you have clients to focus on.
That’s why finding the right partner to handle your law firm website maintenance is key.
Below, we give you the tools to understand:
- What lawyer website maintenance is and why it matters
- How to find the right maintenance partner
- What packages and support to look for
What Is Law Firm Website Maintenance?
Law firm website maintenance refers to keeping your legal site running well with regular updates, testing, and optimization to secure data and attract potential clients with valuable insights and legal industry case studies. Typical law firm maintenance tasks include:
- Refreshing a legal advice column with new posts
- Publishing new client case studies
- Monitoring security to keep client information safe
- Updating plugins and themes
- Improving service page load speeds
- Adjusting search engine optimization (SEO) tactics so you appear to the target audience (e.g., people who have been unfairly dismissed)
- Ensuring all the links on your site (and knowledge base work) properly
Why Is Website Maintenance Important to Law Firms and Lawyers?
If you’re wondering why you should invest in a strong maintenance partner for your lawyer website, we put together a short Q&A session to explain the why and how.
“I’m too busy to maintain my website – why should I bother?”
Well-maintained law firm websites:
- Keep sensitive information secure and prevent data loss
- Attract more potential clients by performing better in relevant search rankings
- Load fast and bring in more visitors by catching their attention faster
- Help lawyers establish themselves as authorities in their niche
A well-maintained site also shows visitors that you genuinely care about your business and their cases.
Website maintenance is crucial for attracting prospective clients to any law business. While you don’t need to maintain your site yourself, you must delegate the tasks to the right expert.
“Why should I worry about SEO?”
Without a good website SEO and maintenance plan, you won’t appear in any relevant search results.
For example, If you’re a divorce lawyer, you want to appear to people looking for family law advice, not immigration or employment support. Regularly adjusting keywords to changing searcher behavior helps you rise through search engine rankings to reach those prospects.
In fact, up to 79% of law firms claim SEO is their most effective online marketing tool for turning visitors into clients. What’s more, weak or non-existent keywords cause your site to fall on search results pages, meaning fewer people see you. Worse, they may visit your rivals instead.
“Are first impressions important?”
First impressions are crucial – research shows people form opinions about your website (and, therefore, your firm) in just 0.05 seconds.
Once you’ve attracted people to your website with the right keywords, you must keep them engaged and establish credibility. For example, consider refreshing your site’s content with recent case studies and client reviews.
A solid case study is social proof that could make all the difference to a visitor who is unsure whether to call you. Instead of telling, show your visitors the difference you’ve made to people’s lives through the cases you’ve won, and let them speak for themselves.
“Does my visitors’ experience really matter?”
Absolutely!
For people to become clients, your site must offer a professional, polished user experience, with pages that load efficiently, carefully edited and updated relevant content, and working links.
Calling you may be a client’s first experience working with a lawyer, so make it count. A sluggish, broken website suggests to clients you might not care enough to handle their cases professionally.
Besides, your chances of losing a visitor’s interest increase by 32% if your site loads in three seconds instead of one. How’s that for pressure?
“Does maintenance need to include security?”
Yes! Although software such as malware scanners can keep clients’ data safe, regular site updates and testing are a must.
A poorly maintained website that leaks sensitive data can harm your reputation. Your maintenance partner must set up regular security checks to keep your site running safely and bring in clients.
Worryingly, many legal websites go through data loss, with 29% of law firms experiencing security breaches like site hacking.
On the other hand, a well-maintained, protected site benefits from regular:
- Malware scans
- Core file and software updates
- Data backups
- Password changes
- Error monitoring and fixes
How To Perform Law Firm Website Maintenance in 3 Steps
Let’s be honest – we know you don’t want to DIY your site maintenance, and that’s why we’re leaving this route out of your guide.
Instead, we focus on helping you find maintenance support experts who take care of your well-designed website in the background while you focus on your core business.
Follow these three steps to find a law firm website maintenance and security partner that really understands your needs:
- Understand what you’re looking for
- Find the right law firm website maintenance partner
- Outsource website maintenance to optimize performance and productivity
1. Understand what you’re looking for
Your ideal maintenance service must be able to take care of your:
- Site and software updates
- Security vulnerabilities and cyber threats, scanning, and updates
- SEO strategy
- Visitor traffic analysis (i.e., where clients come from)
- Fresh content and updates
- Website editing
- Mobile law firm website management
- Website host transfer and support
- Error management and fixes
- Data backups and site restoration
2. Find the right law firm website maintenance partner
To achieve the best maintenance results, look for agencies with specific experience in managing law firm websites. They’re best positioned to improve your conversion rates because they understand your customers and what you need from your legal content.
So, pick a maintenance agency with a strong legal website portfolio and a team that understands your business’s niche.
When researching partners, check if they can handle the tasks listed in step one and prioritize companies that offer proactive, real-time support.
Do they have 24/7 monitoring and regular maintenance? Is there a user dashboard where you can check for red flags and raise questions? You need a team that can take the wheel consistently behind the scenes, not just be available to fix a problem whenever it arises.
If a prospective service isn’t clear about what it has to offer, it never hurts to ask. In fact, you should always choose a partner that prioritizes clear, open communication and uses plain, jargon-free language.
Your ideal agency should also proactively make recommendations for optimal performance or lower costs.
With a partner that’s happy for you to go hands-off, you can focus on building your reputation while they uphold it with a secure and accessible website with faster load times.
3. Outsource website maintenance to optimize performance and productivity
Done your research? Great! Now, it’s time to pick a long-term partner and outsource your website maintenance.
Always choose an agency to have your back because freelancers and internal hires don’t give you the same return on investment. Internal hires translate to spending more money on salaries and benefits. When you hire a freelancer, you only gain one expert, not an entire team, and you never know when they might drop you for greener pastures.
Having an expert agency on contract means you don’t have to waste time finding someone who can solve problems. Besides, you get the same level of maintenance care long-term – there are no quick, uneven fixes.
An agency monitors your site around the clock, which can save serious money by investing in website maintenance sooner rather than later since:
- Your site has fewer errors and compatibility issues, which prevents business losses
- You consistently appear higher in Google and Bing search rankings, attracting more clients
- Your accessible, informative content encourages repeat business
Outsourced maintenance is a powerful tool for scalability, too. If your business grows, you may experience a huge new wave of visitors and clients.
Instead of struggling to cope, a scalable maintenance partner optimizes your speed and helps you find a more robust server solution to handle the traffic. What’s more, if your law firm expands and you want to take on more partners, the team can take care of a whole portfolio of sites.
We speak from experience as a reliable long-term maintenance partner that offers consistent support and background monitoring for many legal firms.
Take our work with Ranchod Law Group as an example. Before working with StateWP, the business struggled with a slow site that failed to attract clients. To help turn things around, our team took on complete management of the firm’s plugins, site updates, and content publishing.
The result is a more professional, faster-loading law firm site that regularly connects new clients to Ranchod’s lawyers. Beyond optimization, we supported the company’s scaling by adding a second site to its growing portfolio.
Get Started Today with our WordPress Law Firm Website Maintenance Plans
StateWP offers three website maintenance packages that scale with your needs – Starter, Premium, and Elite.
The Premium tier is the best value option, and it includes all the consistent maintenance oversight law firms need without burning a hole in your pocket.
At this level, we handle maintenance must-dos such as speed and performance boosts, visitor number reports, mobile-friendly website design testing, and content editing and publishing.
That’s the kind of support we offer Jimeson Birr, a business law firm that approached us to help break free from too many third-party ties. Through a Premium plan, we helped the company regain control of content, hosting plan decisions, and ownership of all its third-party accounts. We also maintain the site’s enhanced speed and performance by regularly testing and adjusting its pages and media and provide a rapid-response support service.
As an Elite customer, you can delegate all aspects of website updates and security management, SEO auditing, and advanced feature testing to us.
It’s an ideal choice for larger firms such as Lamano Law, a current Premium Plan client that already relies on StateWP for 24/7 security breach monitoring, plugin management, and consistent performance optimization. With an Elite plan, the company could benefit from extended SEO support and policy license creation – two more hassles taken off its plate.
If you’d like to know more about how our law firm website support could improve your online performance and profitability, get started with a free audit.
Make Law Firm Website Maintenance a Priority Without Losing Billable Hours
Legal websites need regular care and a proper maintenance schedule to keep clients flowing in.
By partnering with a reputable law firm website maintenance agency, your site’s updates, security, content, and performance are all taken care of – meaning you can focus on legal services, client relationships, and winning cases.
Book a free consultation with StateWP to get started immediately:
In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about what goes into regular website checks and measures (and why they matter), read our website maintenance checklist.
Website Maintenance for Legal Firms: FAQs
Let’s close with a few questions about ongoing website maintenance for lawyers.
Do law firm websites need to be maintained?
Yes! A well-maintained legal website has faster loading times, keeps client data safe, and appears more regularly in relevant search rankings. All are fantastic ways to encourage new clients to call you for legal advice. By partnering with the right law firm website maintenance agency, you don’t have to do any associated tasks yourself.
What happens if a website is not maintained?
A poorly maintained website is slow and difficult to navigate and has compatibility issues, driving potential clients away. It’s also less secure, putting it at serious risk of hacking and data loss. In the long run, not maintaining your website leads to a loss of revenue and reputation, so you should always delegate regular health checks to reputable experts.
What are common website maintenance issues faced by law firms?
Law firm owners often struggle to update their content regularly, and many are unsure how to secure their sites effectively against hackers. Slow load times and server issues also plague these sites – particularly because owners don’t have time to research and fix them. That’s why legal professionals delegate their ongoing maintenance to partners instead.
How much are website maintenance services for law firms?
Law firms can expect to pay up to $500 per month in WordPress website maintenance costs. That covers crucial maintenance plan areas such as content management, site updates, security monitoring, SEO strategy, and speed optimization. Your specific needs might change the price you pay, so always research the market and look for a scalable, flexible partner.