In the modern age of running a practice, a law firm website needs to be more than just a digital business card to help your firm stay competitive and continue to grow. Today, potential clients expect to learn more about your firm, their legal issue, and potential solutions all within your firm’s website. What’s more, your clients expect a landing place for answers to their questions and other helpful resources they may need while working with you. 

There seems to be no shortage of advice, tips, and best practices for attorneys to follow when it comes to managing their online presence, but in reality, there are three key things that every successful website has in common: Good user experience, clear messaging, and mobile-friendly design. 

In this blog series, we will be taking an in-depth look at each of the three pillars of powerful law firm websites individually. Read on to learn more about our first pillar of powerful law firm websites: User Experience.

Pillar 1: User Experience

When a potential client visits your website, can they expect a modern interface, intuitive navigation, and attractive design? Or, would they struggle to find the information they seek, become dizzy from poorly chosen colors, and wait minutes for a single page to load? 

A high-quality website is not only what your potential clients prefer but expect from your law firm. For many, the first interaction with your website will be their first impression of your firm, and could influence their decision to hire you. A pleasant user experience can help your firm nail the first impression and convert the client while a poor user experience could influence the client to continue their search for legal representation.

There are a few key elements that make up a positive user experience for your web visitors. Below, we outline these elements and provide insight into how you can implement these into your law firm website.

Ease of navigation 

Your website’s navigation is one of the most important design aspects and can make or break a potential client’s user experience. Consider it from the perspective of your potential client: They’re dealing with a stressful, complicated, and potentially scary legal issue and are researching what to do next. Once they find your website, you have the opportunity to provide them with much-needed relief by giving clear answers to their questions and a helpful plan of action. Not only does this position you as an expert and problem solver, but as the clear solution to their issue. 

The navigation of your website plays a big role in how you can effectively position yourself as the answer to your potential client’s issues. Not only do your web pages need to be easy to find, but your navigation should also encourage natural exploration. As a result, the potential client remains on your website for longer, builds trust, and feels comfortable reaching out to you. 

Not sure if your web pages are easy to navigate? Try the three-click test: Starting from your website’s homepage, try to navigate to any page on your website in three clicks or less. If you find some pages take more than three clicks to get to, they may need some attention. For most web visitors, they don’t have the time nor the stamina to dig through your website to find relevant information. If they can’t find it immediately, it’s very likely they will return to Google and continue their search resulting in a loss of business for your firm.

Ready to get started? Follow these tips for crafting your website’s navigation:

1. Keep it simple and intuitive. Limit your navigation menu items to the main pages of your website. For example, these are your practice areas, attorney bio or about the firm, contact page, resources, and similar. In addition, use straightforward and descriptive labels for menu items. Prioritize the menu items based on what web visitors are most likely to seek first.
2. Nest secondary pages within drop-down menus. Using logical groupings, categorize your website’s secondary pages beneath your primary pages. For example, your Personal Injury practice area may feature subcategories in the drop-down menu such as Car Accidents, Workplace Injury, or similar. Limit your drop-down menus to one sub-level to prevent confusion and streamline the appearance. 
3. Try a footer menu. Include a secondary navigation menu featuring your website’s primary pages or essential links in the footer of your web pages. 
4. Maintain consistency. Ensure any stylistic or organizational choices are uniform throughout your site’s navigation.
5. Include click-to-call phone numbers in the headers and footers of your website. Whether this is a clickable number or a contact button, ensure it is easily accessible and visible. (Tip: All LawLytics websites are automatically formatted to support click-to-call phone numbers for your law firm website.)

Here’s an example of how you might structure your website’s navigation menu:

1. Home
2. About Us
   1. Our Firm
   2. Our Team
3. Practice Areas
   1. Personal Injury
      1. Car Accidents
      2. Rideshare Accidents
      3. Bike Accidents 
   2. Family Law
      1. Divorce
      2. Child Custody 
   3. Estate Planning
      1. Wills and Trusts
4. Resources
   1. Blog
   2. FAQ
   3. Case Studies
5. Client Testimonials 
6. Contact Us

Tip: The LawLytics platform features drag-and-drop technology so you can arrange and rearrange your navigation menu with ease. Simply click and drag to move your menu items in your LawLytics dashboard and refresh your website to see the change! No coding or technical experience required.

Fast load times

For attorneys, your website needs to be effective in conveying professionalism and reliability to your potential clients. One of the most powerful influences of this for your website is a fast loading time. Your web visitors expect your website to load quickly, and a slow-loading site can start your first impression off on the wrong foot. 

Page load speed is also an important factor in Google’s ranking algorithm, meaning that your page’s load times can impact your website’s visibility on Google for relevant searches. Google uses Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics related to speed, responsiveness, and visual stability, to rank pages. Slow websites may be penalized in search results. In addition, faster websites are easier for search engines to crawl and index, improving your chances of ranking higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

To help encourage your potential clients to stay on your website for longer and build trust with your firm, quick-loading pages can be very helpful. Faster load times can lead to longer session durations, as your potential clients are more likely to stay and explore the site.

To help improve the page load speed of your firm’s website, follow the below tips:

1. Test your website speed. If you’d like to test the current speed of your website, try using free website speed testing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. Here you can get a performance score and detailed recommendations for both mobile and desktop versions of your law firm’s website.
2. Optimize your images. Images are great for creating visual interest, but they can slow down your load times. Try compressing your images and using modern formats like WebP for faster loading.
3. Avoid the use of too many videos. Like images, videos can be beneficial to your website but may cause a slowdown in loading time. Try to limit the number of videos you dedicate to each web page to ensure the best load time possible.
4. Stay away from unnecessary link redirects. Direct links tend to load more quickly for web visitors. Regularly audit your site to remove or update outdated redirects.

Tip: For websites built by LawLytics, essential optimization for page load speed is performed automatically.

Accessibility 

Web accessibility makes your firm’s website content more accessible to your potential clients as well as search engines. By expanding your website’s ability to cater to multiple accessibility needs, you can reach more potential clients online. By helping search engines better understand your written content, you are helping them deliver it to your potential clients through search and improve the overall searchability of your web pages.

To help your website cater to multiple accessibility needs or preferences, your site could offer settings or elements such as:

• Adjustable text size. Depending on the preference of your web visitor, the text on your website should be easy to resize without diminishing the readability of the content or degrading the function of the page. 
• Alt text fields. These fields provide your web visitors and search engines with written information about the images and video on your website.
• Color contrast tool. Good color contrast allows all web visitors to see your website regardless of their device, the lighting of their surroundings, or any visual impairment. 
• Semantic HTML. Semantic HTML or semantic markup is HTML that introduces meaning to the web page rather than just presentation.
• Accessible contact forms. Beyond their basic intention to help potential clients get in touch with you, an optimized web form can keep you more organized, deliver invaluable data points about your leads, and help you drive more business to your practice.

Tip: All LawLytics websites are designed and built to ADA accessibility standards. LawLytics members can also easily integrate UserWay, a free web accessibility widget, with just one click. 

Engaging, high-quality website content

High-quality website content is the key element for delivering the best possible user experience to your potential clients. Your website’s content influences both when and how your potential clients discover your firm’s website in their online journey as well as how long or in-depth they interact with your firm online. In the end, it’s your website’s written content that is the driving factor for growing your business online.

Regardless of your area of expertise, all high-quality written content will have the same three elements in common:

1. It’s informational. The content provides original information, reporting, research, and/or analysis.
2. It’s educational. The content works to answer the questions of your potential clients through a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic. The content provides insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious.
3. It’s written in plain language. The content avoids using legalese or provides thorough explanations of any legal terms used.

As a LawLytics member, you can take content writing off your plate with the LawLytics smart content generation tool. Our practice area content is professionally written and optimized for search engine performance, eliminating the guesswork for what will perform online. Simply choose from one of our 320+ practice area topics, customize the content, and publish pages of new practice area content to your website in just minutes. 

LawLytics is the Leading Website Solution for Attorneys

When you need your website to be a little bit of everything for your small law firm, you need a powerful, reliable, website solution. LawLytics is the answer. With our attorney-specific technology, solos and small law firms have everything they need to transform their online presence and grow their business. 

We would love to give you a personalized tour of our technology and show you what makes LawLytics the leading website solution for solos and small law firms across practice areas. Schedule a no-obligation demo with us.