What a Law Firm Website Costs, and What It Actually Needs

en 2026-09-14 7 min read

A law firm website costs EUR 1.500 to 3.500 excluding VAT. That is step 03 on our price ladder, and a firm ends up there because the site has to carry a page per practice area, a profile per lawyer, and an enquiry route the firm can defend when someone asks what happens to what a client sends.

A client portal with logins and document exchange pushes it to step 04, EUR 3.500 to 7.500. Logins and payments are the line between the two.

What step 03 covers for a firm

Step 03 is 4 to 7 pages, a CMS, service pages and an enquiry flow, built in 3 to 6 weeks. For a firm with a few practice areas and one office, that is the scope.

• A home page naming the practice areas, the city and the kind of client the firm acts for.
• One page per practice area you want instructions in: employment, family, immigration, commercial contracts, litigation.
• A profile per lawyer: admission, qualifications, languages, sectors and a direct way to reach them.
• Fees and how you charge, whether that is hourly, fixed fee, capped or on a retainer.
• A firm page with registration details, professional body, insurer, office address and company number.
• Contact, with the enquiry form and a plain statement of what happens after it is sent.

Practice area pages are the site

Someone with a problem searches the problem, not the firm. A practice area page has to say what the firm does in that area, who does it, how the firm charges for it and what the first step looks like from the client side. One combined services page collapses all of that into a list that ranks for nothing and answers nobody.

These pages are also where a firm decides what it wants more of. A page exists because the firm wants that work, and an area you have no interest in growing can stay a line in a list.

Credibility is specific or it is nothing

What a prospective client can verify:

• Named lawyers with photographs, admission details and the bar or professional body they are registered with.
• Registration number, office address and insurer, where you are required to publish them.
• The languages each lawyer works in, because a client will instruct the firm they can be precise with.
• Sectors and matter types described concretely, without naming clients you are not free to name.

What undoes it: stock photographs of gavels and scales, an unnamed team, and an enquiry form that produces no reply.

The enquiry form is the confidentiality problem

A form inviting a visitor to tell you about their case collects privileged and sensitive detail, sends it through an email relay and parks it in a shared mailbox before anyone has run a conflict check. That is decided on the website, not in the engagement letter.

• Keep the fields to a name, a contact detail, the practice area and how urgent it is. Facts belong in the call.
• State on the form that sending it creates no lawyer client relationship and that no conflict check has run.
• Decide who receives it, a named partner or an intake mailbox with known access, then decide retention.
• Keep session recording and heat mapping scripts off the enquiry page, since they capture what a visitor types.
• Serve it over TLS, host in the EU where the firm requires it, and keep third party trackers off the form.

None of that is legal advice. It is the set of choices a build forces, and whoever owns compliance should sign them off before launch.

When a firm needs step 04

A client portal is step 04: EUR 3.500 to 7.500, 6 to 12 weeks. Logins, matter status, document exchange, secure messaging, invoices and card payment live there, because accounts and payments are what separate step 04 from step 03.

Before commissioning one, look at the case management system the firm already pays for. If it ships a portal, connecting to it is far less work than building a second one. If the portal becomes software the firm runs across offices, it is step 05, from EUR 7.500, priced after discovery.

Which step fits

The whole ladder is on packages.

What it costs after launch

Care, EUR 100 to 300 per month. Updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. Not a redesign and not new features, which we say at the start rather than let scope drift.

SEO foundation, EUR 450 to 750, one off. Search Console, analytics, indexation, technical hygiene, titles, internal links and a plan covering the next 3 to 6 months. A single piece of work that does not repeat.

SEO growth, EUR 500 to 800 per month. Continuing technical and on-page work, practice area and location pages, internal links and reporting. A firm whose diary fills on referrals alone has no reason to buy it.

Process and timeline

1. A scoping call, then a fixed quote. Nothing gets built against a range.
2. Content: practice area text, lawyer profiles, photography and fee wording. Approval sits with people who bill by the hour, so this is the part of the calendar to protect.
3. Design and build. 3 to 6 weeks at step 03, 6 to 12 weeks at step 04.
4. Intake tested end to end: submit the form, watch where it lands, confirm who can open that mailbox.
5. Launch, redirects from the old URLs so existing links and rankings survive, then Search Console verified.

How the build is put together is on our Next.js development page.

When to spend less

If every instruction arrives by referral and the firm has no intention of changing that, the site is a credibility check rather than a channel. Step 02 at EUR 900 to 1.500 does that honestly: who you are, what you do and how to reach you.

If the current site works on a phone and reads well, and the real problem is that nobody outside the referral network finds it, the SEO foundation at EUR 450 to 750 is the better first spend. It does not repeat, and it tells you whether the site can compete before you rebuild it.

A portal commissioned because one client asked for it is not a portal. Keep sending documents the way you send them now, and revisit when the requests stop being isolated. A client login added later is an add-on at EUR 1.500 to 4.000.

Questions firms ask

Do we own the site?

You own the code, the repository and the database. Hosting can sit with us, and that is agreed per client rather than assumed.

Can you build a client portal?

Yes, at step 04, EUR 3.500 to 7.500. We check first whether your case management system already has one, because connecting to it is cheaper and leaves documents where your retention policy already reaches. If it does not, we scope logins, document exchange and messaging as a build.

Do you build in more than one language?

Yes. A second language adds translation, a language switch, separate URLs per language and separate search work per language. It moves the quote, and we price it at scoping once we know which pages exist in which language.

How long before it is live?

3 to 6 weeks at step 03 and 6 to 12 weeks at step 04, counted from the point the content is ready. Approval inside the firm, not the build, sets the real date, so the quote names what we need from you.

Tell us the practice areas, who needs a profile, and whether a portal is in scope, and we will come back with a fixed quote. Start here.