Short answer: An Illinois lawyer website redesign is the best chance you will get to fix the suburb pages. Chicagoland firms accumulate dozens of location pages — Naperville, Schaumburg, Oak Park, Evanston, Joliet — that differ only in the place name, and a rebuild is the only moment when deleting forty URLs is a normal part of the project rather than an alarming standalone decision. This guide sets out how to decide which location pages survive, and how to consolidate the rest without losing what they earned.
Nobody ever removes a location page in isolation. Everybody can remove thirty during a redesign.
What Illinois adds to a redesign
Illinois governs lawyer advertising through Rules 7.1 through 7.5 of the Illinois Rules of Professional Conduct, with the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission administering discipline for the Supreme Court of Illinois. We cover how the rules bear on city pages in the Illinois attorney advertising rules guide.
The reason Illinois surfaces this problem more than most states is geography rather than regulation. One dominant metropolitan area containing dozens of distinct municipalities, each a plausible search term, produces an obvious and bad idea: generate a page per suburb. A firm with one Loop office ends up claiming a presence in thirty communities.
That is a content quality problem and a claims problem at once. A page headed “Naperville Divorce Lawyer” implies something about presence that a firm may not be able to support, and the ARDC’s interest is in whether communications mislead — not in whether the page ranked.
Sort the pages before you rebuild them
Pull twelve months of analytics by landing page and Search Console impressions by page, then sort every location URL into one of four groups. Twelve months matters because legal traffic is seasonal.
| Group | What it looks like | What to do in the rebuild |
|---|---|---|
| Earning and true | Traffic, and you really serve there | Keep the URL, deepen the page |
| Earning but thin | Traffic, but generic copy | Keep the URL, rewrite in place |
| No traffic, no presence | Template page, place name swapped | Retire, redirect to the practice page |
| No traffic, real presence | You serve there, page is poor | Rewrite or consolidate into one page |
The second row is the one firms get wrong. A page that ranks but reads badly should be rewritten on its existing URL, not deleted and replaced at a new address. You keep everything it earned and fix the only thing that was wrong with it.
The third row is the bulk of most Chicagoland sites, and retiring those pages is an improvement rather than a loss. Redirect each to the relevant practice area page — not to the home page, which is treated as a soft 404 and helps nobody.
What a location page needs in order to survive
If a page is going to exist for a place, it has to say something true and specific about serving that place. That is a higher bar than most firms apply, and it is what separates a page worth keeping from forty worth deleting.
Workable material: which courthouse matters of this type are heard in, and what that means practically. How the process differs in that county. Whether you have an office there, and if not, how you actually serve clients in that area — stated plainly rather than implied. Matters you have handled in that venue, described in whatever terms the rules allow. Local details that demonstrate familiarity rather than asserting it.
If you cannot write six hundred words of that for a given suburb, you do not have a location page. You have a place name, and the honest answer is one strong page for the metropolitan area you genuinely serve.
One structural note for an Illinois lawyer website redesign: keep service pages and location pages separate in the new architecture, and decide the pattern once. A site that mixes practice-plus-place pages with practice-only pages and place-only pages competes against itself, and a rebuild is the moment to settle it.
Handle the schema and the address honestly
Rebuilds regenerate structured data, usually from a theme or plugin, and location markup is where inaccuracy is easiest. A page that declares an address in a suburb where the firm has no office is making a machine-readable claim nobody at the firm reviewed.
Check what your new site outputs. Where you have one office, say so — one accurate location beats thirty invented ones, both for Google and for the rules. Where you have a genuine second office, it belongs in the markup with its real address and its own page.
Illinois lawyer website redesign: frequently asked questions
Should I delete thin location pages during a redesign?
Check twelve months of data first. Pages earning nothing, with generic copy and no real presence behind them, are better retired and redirected to the relevant practice page. Pages that earn traffic should be kept at their existing URLs and rewritten in place.
Where should retired pages redirect to?
To the closest genuinely relevant page — usually the practice area page the location page was supporting. Bulk-redirecting retired pages to the home page is treated as a soft 404 and passes nothing.
How many location pages should a Chicago law firm have?
As many as you can write six hundred words of specific, true content for. For most firms that is between one and five, not thirty. Depth on a small number outperforms breadth across many.
Do location pages raise advertising rules issues in Illinois?
A page can imply a presence or a service area, and communications must not be misleading. Whether a particular page or address markup crosses that line is a question for the ARDC and your ethics counsel rather than for a marketing agency.
How long does an Illinois lawyer website redesign take?
Eight to sixteen weeks is typical. Consolidating a large set of location pages adds mapping work at the start but usually shortens the build, because there are fewer pages to design and populate.
Illinois lawyer website redesign: the short version
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: list every location page on your site with its twelve-month traffic beside it. On most Chicagoland law firm sites, three pages earn everything and the rest earn nothing while making claims about presence the firm cannot support. Deleting those in a redesign is not a loss — it is the cheapest quality improvement available to you.
Official source: the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.
Legal Web Agency is a marketing agency, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Nothing here states Illinois’s current requirements or that any particular location page complies. Confirm current requirements with the ARDC or your ethics counsel.
Related reading: Law Firm Website Redesign: Complete 2026 Guide, plus Illinois law firm website content and the Illinois advertising rules guide.
