What to Look for in a Law Firm Website Hosting Provider
Your website is the first impression many will have of your law firm. If it’s running poorly, taking too long to load, or crashing constantly, that reflects negatively on your firm. To be a strong competitor in the industry, your firm needs a professional website hosted by a secure, reliable provider.
In this article, we’ll provide an overview of law firm web hosting, why it’s important, and share important factors to consider when you’re looking for a site host.
What is Law Firm Web Hosting?
Your domain name (or URL) and website data need a place to operate. A law firm web hosting service provides a secure and stable place to store online content including the codes, visuals, and text that make up your firm’s website.
Why is Law Firm Website Hosting Important?
Creating a professional online presence that operates efficiently is critical to law firm marketing. Your web host will impact your website experience for potential and current clients through load times, downtime/uptime, and your search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. Without proper law firm web hosting, your competitors will have the upper hand when it comes to clientele searching for legal representation online.
Important Factors for Legal Website Hosting
A poor legal website hosting service can negate all of the benefits of even the best law firm websites. Your website host shouldn’t create obstacles for your SEO ranking with inconsistent connection times, timeouts, and downtimes.
Strong law firm website hosting is affordable, easy to navigate, provides helpful resources and support, boosts your SEO, and ultimately helps your website generate business. Below are a few key considerations when looking for a legal website hosting service:
1. Reliable and responsive support
You’ll likely need support at some point—even if you’re a website pro. For example, if your website goes down for an unknown reason and your host is unresponsive, this could leave your site down for hours or even days. As a result, potential clients may start heading to competitors.
When considering a legal web hosting provider, ask how often they perform routine updates and how they will communicate that to you. A reliable and reputable law firm website hosting service should provide timely solutions. This includes contact options via phone, live chat, or email—that are available 24/7. They should also help you (even if you have little to no website experience) fix your website so it’s back up and running smoothly.
2. Quick and consistent connection times
One of the most critical components of a strong website host is a quick connection time. Without a fast connection, your potential visitors and clients can lose patience and exit your site—negatively impacting traffic, conversions, and SEO.
According to research from Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg and Hello Bar, every second of delay in page response time will reduce conversion rates by up to 7%. Google recommends that you keep your load time below two seconds.
Several factors can impact your site’s load time. To ensure that prospective website hosts are able to provide a consistently quick load time, ask them the following questions:
- What is the quality of your coding?
- Do you compress images?
- What is the average first-byte time (TTFB) on other sites you host?
Also, ask for examples of websites they host as historical proof of their service quality.
Be wary of any host that will throttle your bandwidth. Throttling means that they will slow down your site after it’s received a certain number of visitors. Usually, you’ll find this with free or deeply discounted website hosts.
3. Minimal server downtime
Though server downtime is less common, it can negatively impact your business even more than a slow connection. Ask any potential law firm web hosting service about their uptime guarantee. Most providers have a 99.9% network uptime guarantee—anything less should be a red flag.
Find the Right Platform to Host Your Law Firm’s Website
Your law firm’s website is an important asset to your firm—carefully consider who you trust with it. With MyCase website design and hosting, you can easily create a fast, responsive, and SEO-friendly custom website. MyCase website services enable you to:
- Embed client intake forms to your site and automate lead input directly to your MyCase dashboard
- Utilize client portal communication to ensure smooth and secure interactions with both prospective and existing clients
- Create mobile-optimized designs that provide a positive experience for mobile browsers
- Provide easy options for potential clients to contact you—such as a one-click “Text Us” feature that saves all messages directly to your MyCase dashboard
- Get paid directly through your website with an embedded link that all clients can access
Additionally, MyCase provides superior service to support your website needs. Our website specialists can have your firm’s site up and running in just 10 days. Take advantage of a free trial today to see how MyCase can help you upgrade your website.
