Website quotes for law firms vary by more than an order of magnitude, and both the cheapest and the most expensive quote can be correct for different firms.
We are not going to publish a fake price table. What follows is the structure of the cost, so you can read a quote and know what you are buying.
Six variables, in order of impact
Page count and page type
Ten pages is not the same as ten templates. A city page and a practice-area page are different builds. Thirty templated city pages is a content project, not a design one.
Design from scratch vs from a system
A bespoke design costs more than adapting an existing component system. Neither is inherently better — a system is faster and more consistent; bespoke can differentiate.
Content
Who writes it. Attorney-written copy is slow and expensive; professional legal copywriting is faster and still costly; template filler is cheap and shows.
Integrations
CRM, intake, calendar, chat, payments. Each integration has a build cost and an ongoing failure mode.
Migration
Moving existing content, preserving URLs and redirecting old ones. Skipping this is the most expensive mistake in the list.
Accessibility and performance work
Real accessibility and Core Web Vitals work takes engineering time. It is frequently the first thing cut and the first thing that costs later.
Not the same project
| Redesign | Rebuild | |
|---|---|---|
| What changes | Visual layer, layout, sometimes structure | Platform, templates, information architecture, URLs |
| Typical risk | Low — content and URLs preserved | High — every URL is a redirect decision |
| Cost driver | Design and content | Architecture, migration and QA |
| When it is right | Site looks dated but structure and performance are sound | Platform is the constraint, or the URL structure is actively wrong |
| Common failure | Cosmetic change with no conversion improvement | URLs change, redirects are missed, rankings drop for months |
If your site loads fast, converts and ranks, a redesign is a risk with no upside. If it is slow and unusable on mobile, a redesign may still not fix it — the platform may be the problem.
The line items absent from most quotes
Content production
Often quoted separately, and it is usually the largest single cost after design.
URL mapping and redirects
Every old URL needs a decision. This is unglamorous, essential, and frequently omitted.
Post-launch fixes
Something always breaks. Budget for two to four weeks of correction after launch.
Ongoing maintenance
Updates, security, backups. A site is not a one-time purchase.
Accessibility remediation
If the build does not include it, you will pay for it later, usually under time pressure.
Analytics and tracking
If you cannot measure intake conversions, you cannot tell whether the new site worked.
Four questions
Ask these before comparing totals — a cheap quote and an expensive quote are often not the same scope.
- What is the page count, and how many distinct templates?
- Who writes the content, and is it included?
- What happens to my existing URLs, and who is responsible for redirects?
- What is included in the first 90 days after launch?
The number most firms miss
A website is not a one-time purchase, and the second year costs differently from the first.
- Year one: design, build, content and migration. The largest single outlay.
- Year one, months one to three: post-launch corrections. Budget for them; something always breaks.
- Ongoing: hosting, maintenance, security updates and backups.
- Ongoing: content production. A site with no new content slowly stops being relevant.
- Occasional: accessibility and performance remediation, usually triggered by a redesign or an audit.
Firms that budget only for the build tend to stop investing after launch, which is precisely when the site starts losing ground to competitors who kept publishing.