For the typical solo attorney or small law firm, what you need to have a successful law firm website is relatively simple and straightforward. However, it can be difficult to cut through the noise of greedy marketing agencies trying to sell you “quick fixes” or the endless number of self-help digital marketing resources for attorneys. In reality, there are three main pillars that make up an effective online presence: Good user experience, clear messaging, and mobile-friendly design.
In this blog series, we take you through an in-depth exploration of each of these three pillars so that you can feel confident in your ability to achieve the success you wish to see from your website. Read on for our final pillar of powerful law firm websites: Mobile-Friendly Design.
Click here to read about Pillar 1: User Experience
Click here to read about Pillar 2: Clear Branding and Messaging
Pillar 3: Mobile-Friendly Design
Your website’s ability to perform across multiple devices and browser types is a top determining factor of your site’s success. It’s true that more and more of your potential clients are using mobile devices to research their legal issues and shop for legal representation. What’s more, search engines like Google prioritize mobile-friendly websites in their search engine results pages (SERPs) rankings.
In order for your website to be considered mobile-friendly, it must be responsive and function well for desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. This means the website is easily navigable, readable, and usable on smaller screens without requiring users to zoom in or scroll excessively.
There are a few key elements of mobile-friendly design that are priority for law firm websites. We outline these elements below.
Responsive design
When a website design is responsive, it will render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes. A responsive design helps your website to be mobile-friendly because it automatically and seamlessly adjusts with the potential client’s device and screen size. Not only does this help your potential clients access the information they’re seeking quickly and conveniently, but it also conveys that your firm is current with the latest tech and user needs.
So, how does responsive design work to deliver a mobile-friendly experience for your web visitors? Elements of a responsive design include media queries that alter web designs based on the user’s device, adaptive images, and fluid layouts. Every LawLytics site is designed to be responsive to ensure mobile-friendliness for your law firm’s website.
Mobile navigation and click-to-call phone numbers
As we outlined in the first pillar of our blog series, User Experience, good website navigation is very important to delivering a good user experience for your potential clients. If your website has a responsive design, your efforts toward streamlined navigation should translate effortlessly for your mobile site. All LawLytics websites are built using responsive, mobile-friendly design, so if you’re already a LawLytics member, this is one less thing you’ll need to worry about.
For your mobile site, your responsive design should support additional features such as a hamburger menu. A hamburger menu is a common design element that is employed in user interfaces on mobile devices and websites that functions to toggle a navigation bar between being collapsed behind the button or displayed on-screen. Its name comes from its appearance, an unintentional resemblance to a hamburger with three lines stacked horizontally. Due to the limited real estate of a mobile device’s screen, the navigation menu of your firm’s website should display as collapsed within a hamburger menu so that your web visitors can view a single page fully and easily. When needed, the hamburger menu should expand to reveal the entirety of your firm’s navigation menu.
Your website’s responsive design should also support click-to-call phone numbers. Click-to-call phone numbers on the top and bottom of your web pages give your mobile web visitors a quick and easy way to reach out. This can also aid in making your website more actionable by providing a shortcut to getting in touch.
Mobile optimization
Simply having access to your desktop website on mobile devices doesn’t necessarily mean your website is mobile-friendly. To get more out of your mobile site and improve the user experience for your potential clients, it’s helpful to ensure your site has been tested for available optimizations. All LawLytics websites are optimized for mobile performance and high-speed load times to ensure the best user experience for your web visitors.
The first test to check if your site is optimized for mobile devices is a speed test. To check the load times of your mobile website and pages, there are several free and paid options available online. A good place to start is with Google’s free tool PageSpeed Insights. Simply enter the page address of your website or an individual page to receive your evaluation. Google offers several data points for your personal use, but the Speed Index will inform how quickly your web page is loading. If your Speed Index is high for mobile, this indicates your pages are loading slowly and may need some attention.
You can also use Google’s PageSpeed insight tool to check if your website is compatible with mobile browsers. After entering your website address, mobile performance data will be provided under the Mobile tab accompanied by a Performance Score. If your Performance Score is particularly low for your mobile site, this is an indication mobile users may have difficulty accessing your site.
To further optimize your website for mobile-friendliness, it’s helpful to “think small” when it comes to what images and videos you’re including on your web pages. This means cutting down on the number of images and videos that appear on each page, but also ensuring that your multimedia content has been compressed and is high-quality. That way, your potential clients have an easier time consuming the written content on your website and can access calls-to-action faster.
Fulfill all 3 pillars of powerful law firm websites with LawLytics
Your law firm’s website is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy and is essential to your firm’s growth. As we showed you through this three-part blog series, your website only needs a handful of essential elements to be a powerful marketing tool for your practice. Not only is our tech simple and straightforward, but every LawLytics website is intentionally designed to provide you with everything you need to have a successful online presence.
Don’t waste time with marketing agencies that can’t cater to your unique needs as an attorney or DIY web builders that are difficult and time consuming. Schedule a no-obligation demo with a product expert to get a tour of our technology.
