What Pages a Law Firm Website Needs: 15 Sites, Measured

If you are about to commission a website, the page list is the first real decision in the project. It sets the scope and it sets the price. Most firms settle it in a meeting before anyone looks at what comparable firms publish.

So that is the thing worth doing first. What follows is what 15 law firm sites actually contain, what the two pages a rule touches require, and the order worth building in.

What the firms that rank actually publish

Every site here turned up ranking for ordinary searches a client would type, across practice areas and metros. So this is a sample of firms with enough visibility to be found, rather than a random sample of all law firms. That distinction matters when reading the numbers.

Their sizes are the first surprise.

The smallest site measured runs 460 pages and the largest runs 4,798, with the median at 973.

That is the gap between the question as usually answered and the answer as it exists. A nine-page site is not a small version of what these firms built. It is a different kind of object.

The two sections that no checklist mentions

Strip out the pages everyone already knows about and almost the whole site is left. Every firm in the set runs two large sections, and between them they hold the page count.

A library of articles answering legal questions. Median 333 pages, and one firm publishes 3,563. These are not corporate blog posts but specific, narrow answers. Whether a felon can restore gun rights in Arizona. What a fake ID charge does to a permanent record. How liability works after a wreck when a driver was drag racing.

One firm has built an entire series keyed to individual sections of the Georgia traffic code, a page per statute. That is a firm deciding that the person searching the statute number is worth a page of their own.

Service landing pages, built around a practice and a place. Median 147 pages, up to 1,492. These are the pages at addresses like a Tempe violent crimes lawyer or a Phoenix high net worth divorce attorney. One site in the set carries a city-by-practice matrix running past a thousand combinations.

Both sections share a property worth noticing. Each page answers one specific thing that one specific person typed. That is also, exactly, what makes a page quotable when someone asks an assistant for a lawyer, which is covered separately under law firm ai search visibility.

The pages that are genuinely table stakes

The conventional pages are still there, and the measured counts are more useful than the fact of their presence.

Attorney bios: a median of six or seven. One site runs 116. Each lawyer gets a page, and that is the entire rule. The firms that rank are not combining their attorneys onto a single team page.

Practice area pages at an explicit address: a median of three or four. This number looks small against the service landing pages above, and the two overlap. A firm with four pages under a practice-area section and two hundred city-by-practice pages has not got four practice area pages. What belongs on each of them is covered separately, because law firm practice area pages are the hardest page on the site to write well. It has built the depth somewhere else in the address structure.

One contact page, one about page. Present on almost every site and singular on all of them, which makes them the least interesting pages in the project.

An FAQ section on nine of fifteen. Where present, it is often large, and on one site it runs to hundreds of pages, which makes it a question library under a different name.

What almost nobody has, and which of those matters

Three findings in the absences, and they do not all point the same way.

Not one firm checked has a standalone awards page. Recognition appears inside bios and on the homepage instead. If a proposal lists one as a deliverable, it is proposing something the market does not do.

Roughly half of firms publish neither case results nor testimonials. Both are rule-sensitive in a way a deliverable list rarely flags, with required disclaimers and prominence rules differing by state. Treat either as a decision with an ethics question attached rather than a page to tick off.

Two smaller patterns worth knowing about. About half the firms publish a human-readable sitemap page, a plain index of everything on the site. It costs nothing to generate and starts earning its place once a site passes a few hundred pages. And two firms publish calculators, the kind that estimate a settlement range or a child support figure. Those are rare enough to be a differentiator and expensive enough to be a second project. Treat one as a later decision, not a launch item.

Almost nobody publishes an accessibility statement. That is the gap worth pausing on, and the next section is about why the obvious conclusion from it is wrong.

The two pages where a rule, not a preference, decides

The privacy policy is an obligation, and it has contents

Two thirds of the firms checked have one. California law requires it of considerably more.

Section 22575 of the California Business and Professions Code reaches “an operator of a commercial Web site or online service that collects personally identifiable information.” The information has to be about “individual consumers residing in California.” Such an operator must “conspicuously post its privacy policy.”

A contact form is collection. A firm anywhere in the country whose form could be filled in by somebody in California is inside the description, which is nearly every firm with a website.

The statute also says what the policy has to contain, which is the part a generic template usually misses. It must identify the categories of personal information collected and the categories of third parties it may be shared with. It must describe the process for reviewing and changing that information, if one is offered. It must say how consumers are told about material changes, and state its own effective date. It must disclose how the site responds to do-not-track signals, and whether other parties may collect information about a visitor’s activity across different sites.

There is one piece of mercy in the drafting. An operator violates the section only if it “fails to post its policy within 30 days after being notified of noncompliance.” So this is a fixable problem rather than a trap, though still cheaper to fix before the notice arrives.

Accessibility: there is no standard to comply with, and that is not good news

This is the subject where the marketing and the law have come apart most completely, so it is worth getting from the source.

The Department of Justice says, on its own web guidance: “The Department of Justice does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards” for web accessibility. It adds that businesses “have flexibility in how they comply.” It also says “Existing technical standards provide helpful guidance,” naming the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 as examples rather than requirements.

The one web rule the Department has issued, in April 2024, covers state and local government under Title II. It does not reach a private law firm. A Federal Register notice in September 2025 went further. The Department intends to reconsider whether parts of even that rule “could be made less costly,” on a timetable listed as to be determined.

What does reach a firm is Title III, which “prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities by businesses open to the public.” No numeric standard attaches to it. The exposure arrives as a private lawsuit judged against a general duty, which is a worse position than a checklist rather than a better one.

What to build first

The inventory suggests an order, because the pages divide cleanly into ones that must exist before launch and ones that are the actual long-term work.

• 
  Before launch, the pages that let somebody hire youA homepage, a page per attorney, a page per practice area you genuinely serve, one contact page and one about page. That is the launch set and it is roughly a dozen pages. Add the privacy policy here rather than later, because the obligation starts when the form goes live.
• 
  Then the accessibility work, while the site is smallFixing contrast, form labels and image text across twelve pages takes an afternoon. Across nine hundred it is a project. This item’s cost rises fastest with delay, and it is the only one with legal exposure behind it.
• 
  Then the question library, one page at a time, foreverEvery firm that ranks has one, and it takes the longest to accumulate. Start with the questions clients ask on the phone before they hire you, one page each, in plain answers. A few hundred of these is normal, which is years of work rather than a launch deliverable.
• 
  Then the service landing pages, only for places you actually serveA page per practice per city is how the larger firms got large. It is also the easiest thing to do badly, because a page naming a city the firm has no presence in is thin by construction. Build the ones you can write something true on.
• 
  Decide about case results and testimonials separately, with your rules openHalf the market publishes neither. Disclaimer and prominence requirements vary by state. So this is a question for your own rules, not a page to add because a template has a slot for it.

Two things are worth noticing about that order. The launch set is about a dozen pages, so the usual checklist describes week one fairly and the finished site poorly. And nothing in the long-term work is a design task. A site like this is mostly a writing commitment, on the kind of law firm seo timeline measured in months.

How to check any of this yourself

Every number above came from a file each site publishes on purpose, so none of it requires taking this page on trust.

Pick a firm you compete with and open its domain followed by /robots.txt. Almost every firm names its sitemap on a line in that file. Open the sitemap it points to, and if what loads is a list of further sitemaps rather than pages, open those in turn.

Then count, because the addresses tell you what the firm built. How many attorney pages, whether there is a question library and how deep it runs, whether they run city pages and for which cities. It takes about ten minutes per competitor, and it is the most honest competitive research available. You are reading what they published rather than what a tool estimates.

Two cautions. A site may publish a full translation, which inflated one raw count here by half, so check whether a language prefix is repeating the same pages. And a quarter of the firms tried had no readable sitemap at all. That says nothing about their size, but it does mean search engines are working harder than they need to.

What not to build

Three things the measurement argues against, which is a shorter and more useful list than the usual recommendations.

A standalone awards page. Not one firm checked publishes one, and recognition sits in the bios instead.

A city page for a place you do not serve. The firms running large city matrices are in those cities. A page asserting otherwise is thin, and it makes a claim about the practice as well.

An accessibility overlay widget instead of accessible pages. The statement and the widget are both the appearance of the work. Neither is the work, and the Justice Department’s position means there is no certificate to buy.

Common Questions

Where these figures come from

The page counts come from reading the sitemaps of 20 law firm websites in October 2026, then sorting every address by what kind of page it is. Fifteen returned a readable sitemap. The other five are dropped rather than counted as small, because an unreadable sitemap says nothing about how many pages a site has.

The sample is the same set of domains as an earlier crawler check on this site: firms ranking for ordinary searches a client would type, across practice areas and metros. They are firms with enough visibility to be found, which is the relevant comparison for anyone commissioning a site. They are not a random sample of all law firms.

The counts behind the plain-language column above, out of the 15 firms measured:

Sorting goes by address only. That keeps it reproducible and makes every count a floor, since a page whose purpose is not in its URL stays unidentified. That share ran a median of 2.3% and a maximum of 16.2%. A first pass put the figure near a third, because it missed two whole categories. Articles published at the root of a site rather than under a blog section, and service pages built on a city and a practice. Adding both brought it down, and finding them is what the sections above are about.

The California privacy requirement comes from section 22575 of the Business and Professions Code. The accessibility quotations come from the Justice Department’s own web guidance and the September 2025 Federal Register notice. Both are linked below, and the Department’s page is short enough to read in a few minutes.

AttorneyPlot builds websites for law firms, which is a reason to weigh this page carefully. A measurement showing that sites should be large happens to suit a website builder. Every count here came from a public sitemap, so you can check any firm you like without taking this page’s word for it.

1. US Department of Justice — guidance on web accessibility and the ADA
2. California Business and Professions Code § 22575
3. The September 2025 notice that DOJ will re-examine its ADA regulations
4. American Bar Association — digital accessibility under Title III
5. Google Search Central — creating helpful, people-first content
6. Google Search Central — what a sitemap is and what it lists
7. W3C — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
8. Section 508 — the federal accessibility standard
9. California Attorney General — consumer privacy
10. American Bar Association — 2023 Websites & Marketing TechReport
11. Clio — 2025 Legal Trends Report