Law Firm Website Launch Checklist: What to Check Before You Go Live

The new site is nearly ready. Everyone has signed off the design, and there’s a date in the diary.

This is the week things go wrong. Not dramatically, and usually not on the day. A form stops sending and nobody notices. Old page addresses point nowhere. Three months later the enquiries that used to arrive from Google have thinned out, and nobody can say when it started.

If you’re about to relaunch and you’ve been burned before, you’re right to be careful. A launch is the one moment a firm can lose visibility it spent years building.

This law firm website launch checklist covers what to check before you go live, grouped into the order you’ll actually do it. By the end, you’ll know which checks protect your rankings and which protect your enquiries. You’ll also know what to hand your developer with a deadline.

I’ve also included what to check if you’ve already launched and something feels off.

Key takeaways

• Most launch damage comes from skipped technical steps, not bad design.
• Redirects from your old page addresses are the single most important item on the list.
• Test the enquiry route yourself, on a phone, before anyone celebrates.
• The domain change can take your email with it, so protect that before launch day.
• Compliance pages are quick to sort and awkward to explain if they’re missing.
• If you’ve already launched and something feels wrong, the same checks find it.

Contents

1. Why launches go wrong
2. Before the build: strategy and content
3. The week before: technical and search
4. Legal and compliance for a law firm
5. Protect your email and your domain
6. Have a way back
7. What to ask your developer
8. Launch day and the week after
9. Before anyone calls it finished
10. Already launched and worried?

Why Launches Go Wrong

So what actually breaks?

Rarely the design. By launch day the look has been checked by everyone in the firm. What nobody checks is the plumbing underneath, because it’s invisible until it isn’t.

Here’s a real example. A video production agency came to me after a rebuild by its previous developer, which had cost over £5,000. The new site looked fine. It had also lost the search rankings the business ran on, because the old page addresses weren’t carried over.

The work to recover it took far longer than the launch itself. Organic keywords eventually went from 1,248 to 2,090, and the site settled into 5 to 15 organic enquiries a month.

That damage was preventable with about half a day of checks. That’s the whole point of a list like this one.

Four faults cause most of the trouble I get called about.

The enquiry form looks fine and delivers nowhere, usually because the notification email was never set up on the new host. Old page addresses lead to error pages, so anything Google had ranked is gone. Tracking was added after launch, so there’s no before to compare with. Or the site is still hidden from search engines, because the setting used during the build was never switched off.

None of those are design faults. All four are invisible unless somebody checks.

Before the Build: Strategy and Content

These are the things that are painful to fix later, so settle them early.

• Agree what the site is for. More enquiries, better-fit enquiries, or fewer time-wasters. One main goal, written down.
• Decide who each main page is for, and what that reader is worried about.
• Map the route from landing to enquiry for your two or three biggest services.
• Write the service pages in language a client would use, not the language you’d use with another solicitor.
• Decide what someone sees when they’re not ready to call. A guide, a checklist, an FAQ.
• Gather reviews, results and team bios before the build, not during it.
• Check what your competitors say, so your pages don’t read like theirs.

Most delays I see come from content, not code. Start writing earlier than feels necessary.

The Week Before: Technical and Search

This is the part that protects everything you already have. If you read one section, read this one.

• Map every old page address to a new one. Export the list of your current pages first. Every page that’s moving needs a redirect to its closest match.
• Check the redirects work. Type a handful of old addresses into a browser and see where you land.
• Keep your page titles and descriptions, or improve them, but don’t lose them.
• Check headings are real headings, not text styled to look big.
• Submit a new sitemap in Google Search Console, and keep the old site’s data.
• Check the site loads quickly on a phone on mobile data, not office wifi.
• Set up analytics before launch and confirm it’s recording.
• Check the site isn’t blocking search engines. Test sites are hidden on purpose during the build, and that setting gets left on more often than anyone admits.
• Check your thank-you pages are set not to appear in search. They’re for people who’ve already enquired.
• Remove any links still pointing at the test version of the site.

Common Law Firm Website Mistakes That Stop Enquiries covers what happens when these get missed.

Legal and Compliance for a Law Firm

Your firm is held to a higher standard here than most businesses, and clients notice.

• Privacy policy, terms and cookie notice, all current and reachable from every page.
• A working cookie banner that respects the choice someone makes.
• Your firm’s regulatory details where they belong, including SRA number and the details your regulator requires.
• Complaints information where a client can find it.
• Accessibility. The Equality Act 2010 expects reasonable adjustments for disabled users. Most firms work to the WCAG 2.2 AA standard as the practical benchmark.
• Check colour contrast, alt text on images and keyboard navigation as a minimum.
• If your firm does public sector work, check whether the 2018 public sector accessibility regulations apply to you, because they’re a separate duty.

Worth saying plainly: I’m not a lawyer, and you are. Treat this as the practical list and check anything specific with whoever handles compliance at your firm.

Protect Your Email and Your Domain

This is the one that can take the phones down, and it gets less attention than the design.

Your domain does more than point at a website. It also routes your email. When someone changes the settings to point at the new site, the records that carry your mail can go with them.

• Save a copy of your current domain settings before anything changes. A screenshot is fine.
• Confirm where your email is hosted, and which records it depends on.
• Leave any record nobody recognises alone until you know what it does.
• Change only the records the website needs, unless the email is deliberately moving too.
• After the change, send a test email in and out, and check nothing has bounced.

Ask who is making the change and who is watching it. Both answers should be a name, not “the agency”.

Have a Way Back

Before the switch, agree three things in writing.

Who is making the change, who is available for the next few hours, and how you undo it if something serious breaks. A backup you haven’t tested restoring isn’t a rollback plan.

It’s also worth having two people check that the right version is going to the right place. Copying the wrong test site over a live one is rarer than losing redirects, and far more painful.

What to Ask Your Developer

If someone else is building the site, these questions sort the careful ones from the rest.

• Will you map redirects from every old page address to a new one, and can I see the list before we go live?
• What happens to our email during the change, and who checks it afterwards?
• What’s the rollback plan if something breaks, and who is on hand?
• Who tests the enquiry forms, and will you send me the test enquiry you received?
• Is analytics being set up before launch, and will you show me it recording?
• What happens in the first week if something breaks, and is that included?
• Can I see a site you launched last year that’s still working well?

Ask for the answers in writing. A developer who does this properly will have most of it ready. One who gets vague about redirects is telling you where the risk sits.

Launch Day and the Week After

This is the part that gets skipped, because everyone is tired by now.

• Send a test enquiry through every form. Then check it arrived, in the inbox it’s meant to reach.
• Test the phone number link on a mobile. Tap it, don’t look at it.
• Check the SSL certificate is live and there are no security warnings.
• Check the site on an actual phone, not a resized browser window.
• Confirm who is responsible for answering enquiries in week one, and how fast.
• Take a backup, and check you know how to restore it.
• Check the site again two or three days later, not only on launch day.
• A week later, look at Search Console for errors and at your enquiry count.

That last one matters. Rankings can dip for a few weeks after a move and recover. What shouldn’t happen is silence with nobody watching for it.

Before Anyone Calls It Finished

A launch isn’t done when the site is live. It’s done when you know what you own and who looks after it.

• Get a written record of your hosting, domain, logins and any software licences the site depends on.
• Get access shared securely, not pasted into an email.
• Get a list of the plugins or add-ons installed, and who keeps them updated.
• Confirm in writing whether updates, backups and security are somebody’s job from now on, or yours.

That last point causes more trouble a year later than anything else on this page. Silence usually means nobody.

Already Launched and Worried?

If the site went live a while ago and something feels off, run these four checks in order.

1. Type three or four of your old page addresses into a browser. If any lands on an error page, you have a redirect problem.
2. Send yourself a test enquiry from a phone. Time how long the reply takes.
3. Open Search Console and compare clicks for the three months before and after launch.
4. Search for your firm’s name and two of your main services and see what comes up.

Those four take about twenty minutes. They’ll tell you whether the problem is technical, or whether the site is fine and enquiries are being lost somewhere else. What Happened to Your Last 10 Genuine Enquiries? helps with the second half of that.

Check Where Enquiries Are Getting Stuck

The Enquiry Gap Assessment is six questions and takes about two minutes. You’ll get a score across Message, Decision Path and Follow-Up, plus the first area I’d fix.

Take the Enquiry Gap Assessment

Final Thoughts

A launch is a moving day. The risk isn’t the new house, it’s what gets left behind in the old one.

Most of the list above is quick. The technical section and the email records are the parts worth insisting on, because both are hard to recover once the old site has gone.

If you’re working with a developer, send them the technical section with a date and ask them to confirm each item in writing. A good one will be happy to. Anyone who brushes it off has told you something useful.

And if you’ve already launched and things feel quieter than they should, take the Enquiry Gap Assessment. Two minutes, and it tells you which part to look at first.

Take the Enquiry Gap Assessment

Frequently Asked Questions