How to Know When Your Law Firm Website Needs a New Design?

Setting up a good website is a very satisfying experience, one that, if successful, will help you get your name out there. However, curating a quality law firm website is not simply a process of slapping it on the Internet and calling it good. What works well for a website is not going to necessarily work for your website some years down the line. But how do you tell when that is? It's not exactly like you can just intuit something like that. To help you detect the signs that you need a new design, we have compiled some tips and tricks to guide you to where your website needs to go.

How to Know When Your Law Firm Website Needs a New Design?

Before you even have to wonder about the deeper elements of the website redesign, the thing you need to consider is whether it is even functional. After all, you are not the one who has to use your website, so you may not be able to recognize when something is going wrong. Allowing for feedback from your customers, as well as testing out the website yourself, goes a long way to detecting whether any links have died, or any images or other details were not working. 

Allowing your website to be unwieldy, ugly, and/or nonfunctional can create serious issues for people's interest in sticking around, so make sure that you keep your website maintenance up to date. But making sure your website is functioning and does not look broken is only one-half of these commonsense fixes. There have even been websites for businesses that do not even keep their information updated; for example, websites that change their address and/or phone number but keep the old contact information because they simply forgot to update it.

A relatively modern problem that a lot of law firms face is that their websites were designed with a pre-mobile era in mind. Odds are, when you design your website in the early 2000s, it is not likely going to work very well in a mobile format. And you know what that means? If a mobile user, a potential customer, navigates to your website while looking for law firms to solve their problems, the second they see your website is going to be a chore to navigate due to the non-mobile optimization, they are most certainly going to move on and try a website that is less of a pain to use, so don't sleep on that.

Another added wrinkle about not having a mobile-optimized website design is that Google is going to look over your mobile version over the desktop version and lacking that means that you are going to miss out on a lot of SEO potential. Loading times are also a serious issue for many potential customers. If a website takes too long to load, they may just as well leave and look for a website that will let them get to where they are trying to go faster. Not only that, but it will hurt your SEO ranking if the pages are not loading quickly. 

There are a lot of things to be done to tweak load times, but a good first step to get there is to not have too many images on any one page. Images are nice, but too many can not only be visually over-stimulating but also hurt load times. Speaking of visuals, having too little to your website visually may just well bore any visitors straight out the proverbial door. Try to find the right middle ground between "too much" and "too little."

Blog posts are valuable, but make sure that you do not let things fall behind. It is only going to make your law firm look worse if your last-posted blog is more than a decade old. It will make you look less than diligent, which is a death sentence for any business. Who wants to work with someone who they may deem too lazy to do upkeep? Worse yet, they may even just decide that you are not even open for business, leading to them never contacting you in the first place for you to be able to correct them.

Of course, there are tools that you can use to tell if there is even a problem to be had in the first place. Worrying too much about the quality of your website can eventually become a serious issue, especially if you spend too much time and money trying to fix problems that are not really there. You can look at different performance indicators to detect the presence of a problem. 

Web traffic reports do a world of good to help understand if a problem is found. You can also check to see how much time the average reader stays on your website, how much they are clicking through your website, etc. Ultimately, the best way to get all of this done is to work with a marketing team that specializes in law firms, such as those of Gladiator Law Marketing. It makes such a difference.