Law firm website checklist: 7 checks in 60 seconds

You can check most of what's wrong with your firm's website in about a minute. Look at the footer year, open the site on your phone, check for the padlock, send yourself a test enquiry, hunt for template leftovers, find your team page, and ask ChatGPT what your firm does. That's the whole law firm website checklist, and none of it needs a developer.

We went through more than 40 Sydney firm websites this month. Law firms, accountants, consultancies. The same small problems came up again and again, and they're exactly the ones a new client notices in the first ten seconds.

I wrote this for partners and principals of established firms who haven't looked hard at their own site in a while. Open your homepage in another tab and go through it with me.

1. Does your footer still say 2019?

Scroll to the bottom of your homepage. Look at the copyright year.

One firm we looked at still said 2017. Plenty of others were two or three years behind.

It sounds trivial. A prospective client reads it as "nobody here has touched this site in years", and then wonders what else hasn't been looked at. The Stanford Web Credibility Project lists showing your site has been updated recently as one of the things that make people trust a website.

What to do: ask whoever manages your site to make the year update itself. It's a one-line change on almost any platform. While they're there, check the dates on your news or insights page. A "latest news" post from 2021 says the same thing.

2. What does your site look like on a phone?

Open your site on your own phone, rather than the big monitor in the office.

In September 2026, StatCounter measured slightly more web browsing in Australia on phones than on desktops: 48.6% on mobile against 48.5% on desktop, plus about 3% on tablets. That's all web traffic, not law firm traffic specifically. But someone looking for a family lawyer or a new accountant on the train home is on their phone.

Check three things. Can you read the text without pinching? Does the phone number dial when you tap it? Can you find the contact button without scrolling forever?

What to do: if you have to zoom in to read it, the site was built for desktop and squeezed onto mobile. That usually needs a rebuild rather than a patch.

3. Is there a padlock in the address bar?

Look at the left of your web address in the browser. You should see a padlock or a settings icon. If Chrome says "Not secure", your site isn't using HTTPS.

For a law or accounting firm this one matters more than most. Your contact form asks people to describe a legal or financial problem. A browser warning on that page is the last thing a nervous client needs to see.

What to do: most hosts give you a free security certificate. Your web person can usually switch it on in an afternoon. Then check that every page, including old ones, loads on the https:// version.

4. Have you sent yourself a test enquiry lately?

This is the check I'd do first if you only do one.

Go to your contact page. Fill in the form as if you were a new client. Press send. Then see what happens.

Did it arrive? How long did it take? Whose inbox did it land in? Did anyone reply?

On the sites we looked at, this is where the expensive problems were. One form had a broken reCAPTCHA, so nobody could send it at all. On another, the email button pointed to email@example.com, the placeholder address that came with the template. I doubt either firm knew. A form that quietly fails doesn't send you an error message. You just hear nothing, and assume it's a quiet month.

What to do: send a test enquiry once a month and put it in the calendar. If it lands in a shared inbox nobody owns, fix that too. If enquiries are slipping between inboxes and people, a CRM may help, and I wrote about what a CRM really costs in Australia if you're weighing that up.

5. Are there template leftovers on your site?

Most firm websites start from a template. Bits of that template often survive launch day.

Here's what we found this month. "Write your caption here" sitting on a homepage. A placeholder phone number, 1 234 567 8901, in a header. Buttons that looked clickable and went nowhere.

Each one tells a client that nobody proofread the site. For a firm that sells care and accuracy, that's a bad first impression.

What to do: click every button and link on your homepage and contact page. Read every line of small print, including the footer. Check that the phone number and email in the header match the ones in the footer. It takes ten minutes, and fixing what you find is usually free.

6. Can a client see who's behind the firm?

People hire a lawyer or an accountant they feel they can trust. Before they call, they usually want to know who they'll be dealing with.

Find your team page. Is everyone on it still at the firm? Are there real photos, or a mix of headshots and stock images? Does each person have a line about what they actually do?

The Stanford guidelines put it plainly: show that there's a real organisation, and real people, behind your site. A street address and actual staff photos do a lot of that work.

What to do: update the team page whenever someone joins or leaves. Add a sentence for each person about the kind of work they handle. If you don't have a team page at all, that's worth fixing before anything else on this list except the test enquiry.

7. What does ChatGPT say your firm does?

Open ChatGPT, or Perplexity, or Google and look at the AI answer at the top. Ask: "What does [your firm name] in [your suburb] do?"

Some clients now ask an AI assistant who to call. If it can't describe your firm, or gets your services wrong, it won't recommend you either.

These tools mostly work from what's written on your site and what other sites say about you. A homepage that says "Excellence in service" and nothing else gives them very little to work with.

What to do: make sure your homepage says, in one plain sentence, who you help, with what, and where. Something like "Family law for clients across Western Sydney". Add a short FAQ page that answers the questions clients actually ask. Then ask ChatGPT again in a month.

What should a professional services website checklist include after this?

These seven checks catch the obvious problems. They won't tell you everything. A full professional services website checklist would also cover page speed, how you rank on Google for your own services, accessibility, and whether your Google Business Profile matches your site.

But start here. If you fail one or two, fix them yourself this week. If you fail four or more, the site is probably older than it looks, and patching it bit by bit can end up costing more than starting fresh.

What to do this week

1. Do the three free fixes. Update the footer year, clear the template leftovers, and send a test enquiry. One afternoon.
2. Book a monthly test enquiry. Put it in someone's calendar. Make one person own the reply.
3. Ask ChatGPT about your firm. Write down what it says. That's your baseline.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes on your site, see how we build firm websites, or book a 20-minute call and we'll go through the checklist with you.