Plenty of firms redesign their website because it feels dated, then discover six months later that nothing actually changed for the business. And plenty of others limp along with a genuinely broken site because a redesign feels like a big, expensive faff. Both are mistakes, just in opposite directions. So before you spend a penny, here’s how to tell which camp you’re in.
The signs that you do
Some problems are worth fixing, because they’re costing you enquiries right now whether you can see it or not.
The clearest sign is that your site doesn’t work properly on a phone. The majority of people looking for a solicitor are doing it on their mobile, often in a stressful moment, and if your site is hard to read or the buttons are fiddly, they’ll back out and ring the next firm on the list. Pull your own site up on your phone and try to find your phone number in under five seconds. If you can’t, that’s a real problem.
The second sign is slowness. If your homepage takes more than a few seconds to appear, a good chunk of visitors leave before it’s even loaded. People are impatient, and a slow site quietly reads as an unprofessional one.
Third, look at whether the site actually says what you do. A surprising number of firm websites are vague about their practice areas, or bury them so deep that nobody finds them. If someone can’t tell within a few seconds whether you handle their kind of matter, the site isn’t doing its job.
Fourth, if you’re embarrassed to send a potential client to your own website, that tells you something. First impressions matter in a profession built on trust, and a tired site undercuts an otherwise strong firm.
A website doesn’t need to win design awards. It needs to make a worried person feel they’ve found a firm that knows what it’s doing.
And fifth, if you physically can’t update it. If changing a phone number or adding a new solicitor means emailing someone and waiting a week, you’ve outgrown whatever you’re on, and that friction means your site is almost certainly out of date in small ways that add up.
The signs that you don’t
Here’s the part most web designers won’t tell you, because it doesn’t sell websites: sometimes your current site is fine.
If your site loads quickly, works on a phone, clearly states what you do and how to reach you, and you can update it without too much pain, then you may not need a rebuild at all. You might just need a refresh. New photos, sharper writing on your key pages, a tidy-up of the bits that have gone stale. That’s a fraction of the cost and often a fraction of the benefit lost.
Being on an older platform is not, on its own, a reason to rebuild. Neither is the site being a few years old. Age only matters if it’s actually causing one of the problems above. Plenty of older sites do their job perfectly well, and replacing one that works is just spending money to feel busy.
How to actually decide
Strip it back to one question: is your website losing you enquiries, or just failing to impress you?
Those are very different problems. Losing enquiries is a business issue worth real money to fix. Failing to impress you is often just a matter of taste, and taste is a lot cheaper to satisfy than a full rebuild.
The honest answer for a lot of firms is somewhere in between, which is exactly why a second opinion helps before you commit to anything.
If you’d like one, ask for a free review. I’ll tell you plainly whether your site needs replacing, refreshing, or genuinely leaving alone. I’d rather talk a firm out of a website it doesn’t need than sell it one it’ll regret.