What Should a Law Firm Website Include? (84% of Your Ad Clicks Are on a Phone)

Across ten Australian law firm Google Ads accounts we manage, 83.6% of clicks over the last 12 months came from a phone, and so did 84.6% of the enquiries. For one personal injury firm it was 90%. If your website was designed on a large monitor in a meeting room and signed off on a laptop, most of the people you're paying to send there have never seen it the way you have.

That's the first thing most law firm websites get wrong, and it's far from the only one. Four of the nine Australian law firm homepages we reviewed for this article didn't show a phone number at the top. Only one published any fees. Three showed no reviews at all. Most of them looked good.

A law firm website has one job: turn the right visitor into an enquiry your intake team can sign, and give everyone else enough to know you're not for them. This guide covers what to include page by page, how to structure it, what the rules allow, how fast it needs to be, what it costs in Australia and how to brief whoever builds it. If you're looking for examples, our review of the best personal injury law firm websites scores ten of them above the fold.

What should a law firm website include?

At minimum: a homepage, a page for each type of matter you want, a profile for each lawyer, a contact page, reviews, and the legal pages. As the firm grows, add location pages, fees, articles and case studies. Here's what each page is for.

Most small firms need 15 to 30 pages to cover their work properly, and most of those are matter pages. A five-page website with one "Family Law" page can't rank for parenting arrangements, property settlement, divorce applications and consent orders at the same time, and can't tell each of those visitors they're in the right place.

What should be above the fold on a law firm homepage?

What you do, where you do it, how to contact you, and why someone should trust you, all on the first screen of a phone. Here's what nine Australian law firm homepages show at the top, as we found them in October 2026.

A few patterns stand out:

• The two biggest injury brands lead with a claim check, not the phone. Both push a short online questionnaire as the main call to action. It qualifies the enquiry before anyone picks up the phone, and calls are hard to qualify without taking them.
• Consumer firms use low-commitment calls to action. "Free claim check", "free consultation", "get legal help fast".
• Every commercial firm we checked used brochure buttons. "Learn more" and "Find out more", with no direct way to start an enquiry from the homepage.
• Only the two national injury firms showed how many reviews their rating was based on. The ACCC's guidance is that a star rating should show the number of reviews behind it.
• Only one firm published real fee ranges. For a small firm doing wills, conveyancing or fixed-fee first meetings, that's an easy way to stand out.
• AI assistants have arrived. Two of the nine had AI chat on the homepage.

For your homepage, the first screen on a phone should carry a headline that says what you do and where ("Family lawyers in Parramatta"), a phone number people can tap, one main call to action, a review count, and a real photo of real people. Below that, a "why choose us" section with five or six genuine reasons, short videos of the lawyers, and reviews. Someone who has watched a lawyer explain something for 60 seconds feels like they already know them before the first call. Our video marketing guide covers what to film.

Keep it digestible. People are distracted, usually on a phone, often stressed. Text-heavy sites can rank well and still make it hard for a visitor to get to the point. Our guide to writing law firm website copy covers the words.

How should practice area pages be structured?

One page per type of matter, grouped under practice area hubs. People search for their situation ("how is property divided after separation", "drink driving lawyer Dandenong", "TPD claim through super"), and the page that names their situation is the one that ranks and converts.

Each matter page should answer the visitor's real questions in plain English: what usually happens, how long it takes, the time limits, how fees work, what to bring, and who at the firm handles it. Then one clear call to action. Pages like this are also what makes Google and AI tools present your firm as one that handles that situation. Our guides to SEO for law firms and ranking in AI search cover this in detail.

Most lawyers don't give enough information on their site to call out the specific situations they take on, and the ones they don't. Saying clearly what you don't do saves your intake team as many calls as saying what you do.

Do law firms need location pages?

If you have more than one office, yes: one page per office, with the address, a map, the lawyers who work there and the courts or areas it serves. Multi-office injury firms run 30 to 45 of these. For a single-office firm, a location page for each court you regularly appear at can work for criminal law, where people search the town where their court date is. A regional NSW criminal lawyer we work with has one for each court town he covers.

What doesn't work is a page per suburb with the suburb name swapped in and nothing else changed. That's thin content, and Google treats it that way. A location page earns its place when it has something genuinely local on it. Our article on Google Business Profile for lawyers covers the map listing that sits alongside each office page.

What should lawyer profile pages include?

Enough for someone to choose who they want to deal with. Serious matters in particular are researched before anyone calls.

• A real photo, recent and consistent across the team.
• Experience in plain English: what kinds of matters, for how long, at which courts.
• Accreditations named correctly. Under rule 36.2 you can't imply specialist expertise you don't hold, and accreditation belongs to the person, not the firm. "Jane Smith, Accredited Specialist (Family Law)" is fine. "Our family law specialists" is a risk unless every one of them is accredited.
• Admission, qualifications and memberships.
• A short video if you can.
• Their articles, with the author bio linking back to the profile, so Google connects the person to the content.

How should a law firm enquiry form work?

It should qualify the enquiry, capture where it came from, and get a call back fast, without inviting details that create a conflict.

Qualify. Ask enough to know whether the person is someone you can help: the type of matter, the court or state, any key dates, and how they'd like to be contacted. A stepped form that asks one question at a time, with later questions depending on earlier answers, gets far more completions than a long form on one screen. It also captures partial submissions, so you can follow up with someone who got halfway. For injury firms, the first question can be as simple as whether the matter involves an ongoing injury.

Don't invite confidential details. A prospective client who discloses confidential information about a matter can become a former client for conflict purposes and stop you acting for the other side. Several of the forms we reviewed ask people to "briefly describe your situation". Ask for the type of matter and the key facts you need to triage, and leave the story for the first call, after the conflict check.

Capture the source. The form should record which ad, search or page the enquiry came from, so you can later see which channel produced which signed matter. Our guide to law firm marketing ROI covers how.

Respond fast. If you get back to web enquiries in three or four hours, the best of them have already spoken to someone else. Our article on the 60-second rule explains why speed matters so much, and our intake form guide covers what to ask.

Whether the phone or the form comes first depends on the practice area. Urgent consumer matters (criminal, injury, urgent family) need a tappable phone number everywhere. Matters where qualification saves a lot of wasted calls can put a short questionnaire first and the number second. Our article on whether to qualify leads or take every call covers the trade-off.

What can a law firm website say in Australia?

Your website is advertising under the conduct rules, and the same rules apply to it as to any ad.

State rules can shape design decisions. A Brisbane compensation firm we work with chose a single "free case review" call to action rather than leading with the phone, and kept the word "injury" off its site entirely, accepting some SEO cost to stay comfortably inside Queensland's rules. Our article on lawyer advertising rules in Australia covers all of this state by state.

How fast does a law firm website need to be?

Fast enough to pass Google's Core Web Vitals on a phone, and in practice as fast as you can make it, because nearly everyone you pay to send there is on one.

Mobile matters more for some firms than others. Here's how device use differs between paid and organic visitors.

Across the ten ad accounts, mobile share ranged from 68% for a commercial firm to 90% for an injury firm, with family firms between 76% and 87%. Organic visitors are different. People researching a business dispute or a contract at their desk use desktop far more, and the Sydney litigation firm gets more organic clicks from desktop than mobile. "Mobile first" is right for consumer matters and for any page you advertise. Commercial firms can't treat desktop as an afterthought.

WordPress, a builder or a static site?

This is the decision that has changed most in the last two years.

We moved our own site and our clients' sites off WordPress in 2026. Even with our own designers and developers, changes took too long. A section of our site that would have been weeks of design and development on WordPress was rebuilt in an afternoon. The new sites output plain HTML, are hosted on Cloudflare, and can score close to 100 on Google's PageSpeed Insights. Enquiries go straight from the form to the CRM, so there's no database on the website to hack.

A word of caution, though. If you rely on whatever an AI tool produces first, you get a site that looks like everyone else's. The thinking, the structure and the SEO still need someone who knows what they're doing. And the bigger benefit of a site that's quick to change is that you can act on what the leads tell you. If a type of enquiry starts coming through that you don't want, you can add a qualifying question that afternoon instead of raising a ticket.

The results can be significant. A Sydney commercial litigation firm moved from WordPress to a fast static site and then published question-led content consistently. Its Google search clicks went from 832 in April 2026 to 6,928 in September, more than eight times as many, and impressions grew nine-fold.

The site alone didn't do that. The content did most of the work. But the fast, flexible site is what made publishing and improving that content practical.

How much does a law firm website cost in Australia?

From nothing, if your practice software includes one, to $40,000 or more for a multi-office build. These bands come from Australian agencies and providers that publish their prices.

Sources: Clio Australia, bdog, Legalsites, So Right Creative, Spark Interact and 23 Digital, as published in 2026. Typical timeframes run from two to four weeks for a template build to three months or more for a custom one.

Build cost is falling. Things that used to cost tens of thousands in development, like a custom qualification widget, are now much cheaper to build. What hasn't got cheaper is the thinking: the structure, the copy and the content that make a site rank and convert. Budget for what happens after launch as well. Hosting, updates and security, new matter pages, articles and tracking are where most of the long-term value is. Our general guide to website costs in Australia covers the wider market.

How do you brief a web designer and compare quotes?

Start with the copy. The process that works best is a questionnaire about the firm, then a copy document that sets out what each page says and how the firm is positioned, and only once that's approved does design begin. Skip it and the designer builds what they think you want, and you end up rewriting it on a finished design. When copy is agreed first, most clients are around 80% happy with the first design they see. Lock the homepage before moving to the inside pages.

Your brief should cover:

• The matters you want more of, in order, and the ones you don't want.
• Where the work comes from now and where you'd like it to come from.
• Every page that currently ranks or brings in enquiries, so it's kept or improved, never lost.
• Your practice management system and CRM, and what the forms need to connect to.
• Who reviews the copy for compliance before it goes live.
• Who will update the site after launch, and how quickly changes need to happen.

When you compare quotes, compare the same things:

What goes wrong in a law firm website rebuild?

Most of the problems we fix come from one of these.

If you've already rebuilt and rankings have dropped, our article on why your law firm isn't ranking walks through what to check.

Where should you start?

Look at your current site on your phone, as a stranger would, and ask three questions. Can I tell within five seconds what this firm does and where? Can I call or enquire without scrolling? Is there a reason to trust them on the first screen? Then open your analytics and list the pages that bring in enquiries now, because those are the ones a rebuild must protect.

A website is the foundation of everything a firm does online, and it matters most when you're paying for every visitor. If your ads land on a site that doesn't convert, every dollar works harder than it needs to. Our law firm marketing work runs Google Ads and Meta ads with every enquiry tracked to the matter it produced, and the website is usually the first thing we look at. Book a call and we'll go through your current site with you.