Short answer: A Texas lawyer website redesign usually forgets the part of the estate that is not on the website. Campaign landing pages live on their own URLs, often on a separate platform, rarely appear in the sitemap, and are almost never included in a redesign scope. So they survive the rebuild untouched — still carrying the old branding, the old phone number, the old claims, and pointing at pages that no longer exist. This guide sets out how to bring paid-campaign assets into the redesign properly.
Your redesign covered the website. Your ads are still sending people to the old one.
What Texas adds to a redesign
Texas governs lawyer advertising through Part VII of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, administered by the State Bar of Texas, and it operates a formal advertising review process. We work through what that means in the Texas attorney advertising rules guide, and this guide states no filing requirement, deadline, fee or exemption — those change, and stale guidance is how firms get caught out.
The redesign-specific point is a records point. Whatever your obligations are around keeping copies of what you published, a rebuild is the moment the old versions stop being retrievable. The previous site is gone, the old landing pages get overwritten, and the A/B variants that ran for six weeks last year exist nowhere.
Firms that treat a redesign as a chance to archive what they had, rather than simply replace it, are in a much better position afterwards — whatever the current requirements turn out to be when they check with the Bar.
Find the pages that are not on your website
Ask four people and you will get four different lists, which is itself the finding.
From your ad platforms. Export every active and paused campaign’s final URLs. Paused campaigns matter, because they get switched back on and will then point somewhere that no longer exists.
From your landing page tool. Many firms run pages on a separate platform on its own subdomain. Those pages are invisible to a crawl of the main site.
From Search Console. Landing pages that were meant to be excluded from indexing frequently are not, which means Google has them and so do searchers.
From your call tracking. Tracking numbers are assigned per campaign and per page. The list of numbers in use is a map of the pages in use, including ones nobody mentioned.
Decide what each one becomes
| Asset | Usual state after a redesign | What it should be |
|---|---|---|
| Active landing pages | Untouched, old branding | Rebuilt to match, reviewed |
| Paused campaign pages | Forgotten, still live | Archived or redirected |
| A/B variants | Overwritten, no record | Catalogued before replacing |
| Ad final URLs | Pointing at moved pages | Updated at launch, not after |
| Tracking numbers | Reassigned or orphaned | Mapped to the new pages |
| Old site copies | Gone | Archived before the switch |
The fourth row is the one that costs money immediately. Paid traffic arriving at a redirect chain, or worse a 404, is spend converted into nothing, and in Houston and Dallas personal injury — among the most expensive clicks in the country — that is measured in thousands per day rather than tens.
Rebuild the landing pages properly while you are there
A Texas lawyer website redesign is also the only realistic opportunity to fix what those pages say, because outside a rebuild nobody reviews them.
Four things routinely appear on legal landing pages that would not survive a read-through on the main site. Headlines assembled by the ad platform from the searcher’s own query, which means the firm publishes a sentence it never wrote. Large recovery figures with no case context. Missing identification — a logo and a phone number, no address, no firm details, no disclaimer. And live variants nobody has catalogued, which means the firm cannot say what it is currently publishing.
Fix those at rebuild time and adopt one rule going forward: a landing page is a page of your website, gets the same review as a practice area page, and every live variant is recorded with its copy and dates. That is a small amount of process which happens to solve the archiving problem at the same time.
On indexing: decide deliberately whether campaign pages should be indexed. If they are excluded, they are not competing with your practice area pages and your substance stays where it belongs. If they are indexed, they are ordinary website content and should be built to that standard.
Texas lawyer website redesign: frequently asked questions
Do landing pages need to be included in a website redesign?
They should be. They are published communications about the firm, they carry branding and claims, and if they are left untouched they will contradict the new site and may point at URLs that no longer exist. They are also the pages nobody has read recently.
What happens to paid campaigns during a redesign?
Update final URLs at launch rather than after. Traffic arriving at redirects or 404s is wasted spend, and in the major Texas metros the cost per click makes that expensive within hours rather than weeks.
Should I archive the old site before rebuilding?
It is cheap and it is the only moment you can. Keep a full copy of the pages as published, with dates, along with a record of live landing page variants. Whatever your record-keeping obligations are — confirm those with the State Bar of Texas — you cannot reconstruct this afterwards.
Did the 2021 Texas rule changes affect website rebuilds?
Texas restructured Part VII in 2021 and broadened the circumstances in which advertising is exempt from filing. That was a change to process, not to the substantive standard that communications must not be false or misleading. Confirm what currently applies with the State Bar rather than relying on any summary.
How long does a law firm website redesign take in Texas?
Eight to sixteen weeks is typical. Add time if paid campaigns are running, because coordinating the URL switch with the launch is a scheduling problem rather than a build problem, and getting it wrong is the expensive part.
Texas lawyer website redesign: the short version
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: export the final URLs from every campaign in your ad accounts, including paused ones, and check each against your new sitemap. Most firms find at least one live campaign pointing somewhere that no longer exists. That is money leaving the building every day until somebody looks.
Official source: the State Bar of Texas.
Legal Web Agency is a marketing agency, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Nothing here states Texas’s current filing, retention or exemption requirements. Confirm current requirements with the State Bar of Texas or your ethics counsel.
Related reading: Law Firm Website Redesign: Complete 2026 Guide, plus Texas law firm website content and the Texas advertising rules guide.
