Short answer: A law firm website launch has three phases, and most of the damage happens in the one nobody plans for. Two weeks out you freeze content, build the redirect map and clear the bar-rule items. On launch day you switch DNS, verify every old URL lands somewhere, and submit a form and a call to yourself. In the seven days after you watch Search Console, indexing and lead delivery daily. Below is the full checklist, ordered by when each item has to happen, with the eleven items that are specific to law firms marked.
Generic launch checklists are written for e-commerce and SaaS. They will tell you to test the checkout and set up the newsletter. They will not tell you that your testimonials page needs a results disclaimer in eleven states, that your old practice-area URLs are the only reason the firm ranks at all, or that an intake form which delivers to a mailbox nobody checks is a malpractice exposure rather than a marketing problem. This checklist is written for the launch of a law firm website specifically — a new build or a redesign replacing a live site.
How to use this checklist
Assign one named person to own the launch. Not the agency, not “the marketing team” — one person at the firm who can say yes or no. Every item below is written so that person can confirm it without technical knowledge, or knows exactly what to ask the developer to show them. Items marked [Law firm] are the ones a general web agency will not know to do.
If you are replacing an existing site, the redirect section is the part that protects your rankings. If you are launching a brand-new firm with no old site, skip it — but read the compliance section twice.
Phase 1: two weeks before launch
Content freeze and final proof
- Every page has its final copy. No “lorem ipsum”, no “[insert bio]”, no “coming soon” sections. Search the whole site for the words lorem, placeholder, TBD and coming soon. Sites go live with these more often than anyone admits.
- Every attorney bio is approved by that attorney. Names, titles, bar admissions, schools, years. A wrong admission year on a bio is a bar-rule problem, not a typo. Our attorney bio guide covers what belongs on the page.
- Every practice area you want cases in has its own page. A single “Practice Areas” page listing eight services in bullet points will not rank for any of them. See how to structure practice area pages.
- Firm name, address and phone number are identical everywhere. Footer, contact page, schema markup, Google Business Profile, state bar listing. “Suite 200” on one and “Ste. 200” on another is enough to confuse local search. Pick one format and use it in all five places.
- Read every page on a phone. Not the developer’s preview — your own phone, on mobile data, walking around. Most of your visitors will meet the site this way.
[Law firm] Bar-rule compliance pass
Every state regulates lawyer advertising, and a website is advertising. The specifics vary — our state-by-state guide has the detail for each jurisdiction — but these six items come up in nearly every state and are the ones we see missed at launch:
- Office address on the site. Most states require a physical office address, not just a phone number and contact form. Virtual firms need to check what their state accepts.
- “Attorney Advertising” label where required. New York is the best-known example; several other states have equivalent labelling rules. Confirm for every state where a named attorney is admitted, not just where the office is.
- Results and testimonial disclaimers. If the site shows settlements, verdicts or client reviews, most states require a statement that past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Put it on the page where the results appear, not buried in a footer link.
- No “specialist” or “expert” claims unless the attorney holds a certification the state recognises. This includes the phrase “specializing in” in body copy, which writers reach for constantly.
- Responsible attorney named where the state requires it (Florida, Texas and others have specific rules about who is responsible for advertising content).
- Privacy policy and terms pages exist and are linked. Beyond bar rules, a missing or 404 privacy policy is the single most common reason law firm sites are rejected by advertising and analytics platforms.
[Law firm] Build the redirect map
This is the item that separates a launch that keeps the firm’s rankings from one that loses them for six months. If the new site changes any URLs — and almost every redesign does — each old URL needs a permanent (301) redirect to its closest new equivalent.
- Export every URL on the old site. Use the old sitemap plus Search Console’s Pages report plus Google Analytics’ landing pages for the last twelve months. The three lists will not match; the union is your list.
- Mark which ones matter. Any URL with impressions in Search Console or sessions in Analytics gets an individual redirect. For a typical small-firm site this is 20 to 80 URLs. Everything else can go to the nearest section page.
- Map each to a real destination. Old practice-area page to new practice-area page, old bio to new bio. Never redirect everything to the homepage — Google treats a mass redirect to the homepage as a soft 404 and drops the old rankings anyway.
- Keep the map in a spreadsheet the firm owns, not only in the agency’s plugin. You will need it again at the next redesign.
The full method, including what to do about URLs that have no equivalent on the new site, is in how to redesign a lawyer website without losing rankings.
Technical foundations
- Hosting is decided and paid for by the firm, in the firm’s name, with the firm holding the login. The same for the domain registrar. If the agency holds either, you have a dependency you will regret. Our hosting guide covers what to look for.
- SSL certificate is installed and auto-renewing. Load the staging site over https and check for the padlock. A certificate that expires eight weeks after launch is a classic.
- The staging site is blocked from search engines — and there is a written note to unblock it at launch. Sites go live with “Discourage search engines from indexing” still ticked. It is the most common launch-day mistake in WordPress and it is invisible until you look.
- Every page has a unique title tag and meta description. Not the firm name repeated forty times. The homepage title should say what you do and where, not “Home”.
- Schema markup is in place — at minimum a LegalService or Attorney entity with the firm’s name, address, phone and practice areas. Check it with Google’s Rich Results Test on the staging URL.
- Images are compressed and have alt text. A 4 MB hero photo will undo everything else on this list.
- Forms are tested on staging, including the thank-you page and the notification email.
Phase 2: launch day
Launch on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Never Friday afternoon, never the day before a holiday, never the same day as a trial. You want two full working days after launch when both the firm and the agency are available.
The switch
- Take a full backup of the old site and confirm it can be restored. If launch goes badly you want the old site back in an hour, not a week.
- Lower the DNS TTL 24 hours ahead so the switch propagates in minutes rather than a day. If the agency does not know what this means, ask them to find out before launch, not during.
- Point the domain at the new site.
- Untick “Discourage search engines” and confirm
robots.txtno longer blocks the site. Loadyourfirm.com/robots.txtand read it. - Confirm https works and http redirects to it, and that
wwwand non-wwwresolve to one version.
[Law firm] Verify the redirects with the real list
Take the redirect spreadsheet from Phase 1 and test every row. Not a sample — every row. A free crawler can do this in minutes: paste the old URLs in, run it, and check that each returns a 301 to the mapped destination and that the destination returns 200. The three failures to look for:
- Redirect chains (old URL to an intermediate URL to the final one). Each hop leaks ranking signal.
- Redirects to a page that itself redirects, usually because the new site’s trailing-slash rule differs from the map.
- Old URLs that were missed entirely and now 404. Search Console will show you these within a week; better to find them today.
[Law firm] Submit a lead to yourself
Do this from a phone, on mobile data, not from the office network. Fill in the intake form with a fake but realistic enquiry. Then check:
- Did the notification email arrive, at the address the firm actually monitors, within two minutes? Check the spam folder.
- Does the form store a copy of the submission somewhere the firm can see, so that a lost email is not a lost client?
- If the site claims a response time (“we respond within one business day”), is there a person and a process that makes that true?
- Call the phone number on the site from your mobile. Does it ring where you think it does? If the site has a click-to-call link, tap it.
- If there is live chat or a booking calendar, book a fake slot and see who receives it.
We have audited law firm sites where the contact form had been silently delivering to a departed paralegal’s mailbox for months. The form “worked” — every test the agency ran passed — and every real enquiry went unanswered. A confidential enquiry that nobody reads is a professional responsibility problem before it is a marketing one.
Measurement
- Google Analytics 4 is installed on every page and the firm owns the property. Open the Realtime report and click around the live site to confirm your own visit appears.
- Form submissions, calls and booking clicks are recorded as key events. Traffic without conversions is a vanity number. If this was not set up on staging, do it today, because the first week’s data is the baseline you will compare everything to.
- Search Console is verified for the new site (if the domain changed) or still verified (if it did not), and the new XML sitemap is submitted. If the domain changed, use the Change of Address tool.
- Google Business Profile points at the new URL, and at the correct page if the firm has multiple offices. Check the profile’s website link renders the new site, not a cached old one.
Phase 3: the first seven days
Launch is not the end. The week after is where a redirect miss or an indexing block shows up, and where it is still cheap to fix.
- Day 1 and day 2: Search Console Pages report. Look for a sudden rise in “Not found (404)” — those are the URLs your redirect map missed. Add redirects for any that had traffic.
- Day 2 to 4: indexing. Use the URL Inspection tool on your homepage and your three most important practice-area pages. If they show “Discovered, currently not indexed” a week after launch, something is blocking them — usually a stray
noindextag from the staging build. - Daily: leads. Every form submission and call should be logged by a human. Compare the count to the same week last month on the old site. A drop is a signal; act on it in days, not at the quarterly review.
- Day 7: rankings. Search for the firm name, then for your top three practice-area terms with your city. You should see the new site where the old one was. A temporary wobble is normal; disappearing from a branded search is not.
- Day 7: speed. Run the live homepage and one practice-area page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Staging environments are often faster than production because they have no analytics, chat or ad scripts loaded yet.
- Update every external link you control. Email signatures, the state bar directory, Avvo and Justia listings, LinkedIn, and any directory or association page that links to an old URL. Redirects catch these, but a direct link is better.
The full checklist in one table
| When | Item | Law-firm specific? | Who confirms |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 weeks out | Content freeze; no placeholder text anywhere | Firm | |
| 2 weeks out | Each attorney signs off on their own bio | Yes | Each attorney |
| 2 weeks out | One page per practice area | Yes | Firm + agency |
| 2 weeks out | Name, address, phone identical in all five places | Yes | Firm |
| 2 weeks out | Bar-rule pass: address, labels, disclaimers, no “specialist” claims | Yes | Responsible attorney |
| 2 weeks out | Privacy policy and terms pages live and linked | Agency | |
| 2 weeks out | Redirect map built from sitemap + Search Console + Analytics | Yes | Agency, firm keeps copy |
| 2 weeks out | Hosting and domain in the firm’s name | Firm | |
| 2 weeks out | SSL installed, auto-renewing | Agency | |
| 2 weeks out | Unique titles and meta descriptions on every page | Agency | |
| 2 weeks out | LegalService schema validated | Yes | Agency |
| 2 weeks out | Images compressed, alt text present | Agency | |
| Launch day | Full backup of old site, restore tested | Agency | |
| Launch day | DNS switched; https forced; one canonical host | Agency | |
| Launch day | Search engine blocking removed; robots.txt read by a human | Agency + firm | |
| Launch day | Every redirect in the map tested individually | Yes | Agency, firm spot-checks |
| Launch day | Test lead submitted from a phone; email, storage, phone, chat verified | Yes | Firm |
| Launch day | GA4 live, key events firing, firm owns the property | Agency, firm checks Realtime | |
| Launch day | Search Console verified, sitemap submitted | Agency | |
| Launch day | Google Business Profile URL updated | Yes | Firm |
| Days 1–2 | Search Console 404 report checked, misses redirected | Agency | |
| Days 2–4 | Key pages inspected for indexing | Agency | |
| Daily | Leads logged and compared to the previous month | Yes | Firm |
| Day 7 | Branded and practice-area searches checked | Firm | |
| Day 7 | Mobile speed test on the live site | Agency | |
| Day 7 | Bar directory, Avvo, Justia, LinkedIn, signatures updated | Yes | Firm |
The three launches that go wrong most often
The rankings drop that shows up in month two
The new site looks fine, the firm is happy, and six weeks later the phone is quieter. The cause is almost always redirects: either the old URLs were sent to the homepage, or the map was built from the old sitemap alone and missed the blog posts and location pages that were actually earning traffic. Search Console’s Performance report, filtered to the old URLs, will show exactly which pages lost their impressions. Fix the redirects and the rankings usually return within weeks; leave it and they are gone. How long it takes to rank explains what recovery looks like.
The site nobody can find
Everything works, but a search for the firm’s own name returns the old site’s cached listing, then nothing. The staging noindex setting is still on. It is a one-click fix and it costs a week of indexing every day it stays unnoticed. Check it on launch day and again on day three.
The leads that never arrive
The form was tested on staging with the developer’s email address. On the live site the notification goes to a different address, or the sending domain is not authenticated and every message lands in spam, or the form plugin’s free tier silently stopped storing submissions. Nobody notices because a quiet week is easy to explain. The only defence is the launch-day test from a real phone, repeated a week later.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a law firm website launch take?
The switch itself takes under an hour. The two weeks of preparation before it and the week of monitoring after are where the work is. Plan for three weeks from content freeze to “launch complete”, and expect the build before that to take six to twelve weeks depending on scope.
Will my rankings drop when I launch a new website?
A small, temporary wobble in the first two to four weeks is normal as Google recrawls the site. A sustained drop is not, and it almost always traces to missing or wrong redirects, a leftover noindex, or content that was cut from the new site. All three are preventable with the items above.
Do I need to tell my state bar when I launch a new website?
A few states require lawyer advertising to be filed or reviewed, and in some of them a website counts. Most do not. Check your own state’s rule before launch rather than after; the state-by-state summary is the place to start, and your bar’s ethics hotline is the place to confirm.
What should I check first if leads drop after launch?
In order: submit a test form from your phone and confirm delivery; check the Search Console 404 report for missed redirects; run the URL Inspection tool on your top practice-area page; and confirm the phone number on the site is the one that rings at reception. Those four checks find the cause in the large majority of cases.
Should the agency or the firm own the launch checklist?
The agency should execute most of it; the firm should own it. The items marked as law-firm specific are things a general agency will not know to do and a responsible attorney is accountable for regardless. If you are still choosing an agency, the RFP guide includes launch process as one of the questions to ask.
Launching in the next month? Send us the staging URL and we will run the pre-launch section of this checklist against it and tell you what would have broken. If the site is already live, start with the free audit — it checks the redirects, indexing and schema items above automatically.
