Guides · Updated 06 Aug 2026
Check your own law firm website in twenty minutes
Twelve checks. You need a phone, a browser, and twenty minutes. No technical knowledge. Most firms find three or four faults they didn't know were there — usually a form that stopped delivering, or a page that still mentions the wrong practice area.
Nobody tells you when your website breaks.
A contact form that stops delivering doesn't bounce. A typo in your footer doesn't send an alert. The enquiries just stop arriving, and you never find out why.
What this list is
Our full audit is around sixty checks across seven phases. It takes half an hour and needs PageSpeed Insights, a site crawler, an SSL analyser, a structured data validator and a security header scan.
Twelve of those sixty need nothing but a phone.
Those twelve are below. They're the ones where the fault is visible to anyone, and where finding it doesn't require knowing what a canonical tag is.
You'll find real problems with them. You won't find everything.
Before you start
Open a private browsing window. Chrome calls it Incognito, Safari calls it Private.
Your own browser has been caching your site for years. It will show you a version nobody else sees.
We open a fresh profile for every audit, for the same reason. A cached page mimics a working page exactly.
1. Load your homepage on your phone. On mobile data, not wifi.
Count the seconds until you can read it.
Over three seconds is a problem. Over five and most people have left.
Your clients are looking you up in a car park before a consultation. That's the connection that matters, not the fibre in your office.
We measure this on a throttled connection and record three numbers — first paint, largest contentful paint, and the PageSpeed score out of 100. The stopwatch tells you whether there's a problem. The numbers tell you what's causing it.
2. Read your homepage. Properly.
Not skim — read it.
A family law firm we reviewed had "Stay up to date with the latest news in personal injury law" on their homepage. They do divorce.
The site was nine months old. Someone had built it properly. Nobody read it afterwards.
3. Check your footer for typos.
Nobody proofreads footers.
The same firm's footer said "Spousal Maintenace."
4. Submit your own contact form.
This is the most important check on the list.
Fill it in. Use your own name. Send it.
Then wait five minutes and check your inbox. Check spam too.
If it doesn't arrive, every enquiry since it broke has gone nowhere. You have no idea how long that's been.
When we run this, we also check where the form actually sends, whether the confirmation fires or the page just silently reloads, and whether your firm's mail server is quietly filtering your own website's messages as spam. That last one is more common than you'd think.
5. Click every link in your navigation.
All of them. Including the ones in the footer.
Look for two things: links that go nowhere, and links that go somewhere unexpected.
That family law firm's "Parenting Plan" link opened their separation agreements page. Two different things. A client reading about a parenting plan lands on the wrong page and leaves.
We crawl the whole site instead of clicking. A twenty-page firm site typically has 200 to 400 links. You'll check the twelve in your navigation; the crawler finds the broken one on page nine that nobody has clicked since 2022.
6. Check your email address is the same everywhere.
Contact page, footer, forms, staff pages.
If you find two different addresses, one of them is probably not being read.
7. Tap your phone number on your phone.
Does it start a call?
If it's plain text, someone on a phone has to memorise it, leave your site, and dial it manually. Some of them won't.
8. Look at your homepage for anything showing zero.
Counters, statistics, "years of experience", "cases won".
If a number shows 0, it isn't loading. Every visitor sees a firm claiming zero cases won.
9. Search Google for your firm's name.
What comes up first?
If it's your Google Business Profile rather than your website, that's normal. It also means your profile is doing more work than your site — check the phone number and hours on it are current.
If nothing comes up at all, that's a bigger problem.
10. Ask ChatGPT for an attorney in your city.
In a private window, ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity: "Who are the best divorce attorneys in Pretoria?" — with your own city and practice area.
Note whether you appear.
More people search this way every month. Ranking on Google no longer means appearing here.
We run this against six queries every month for the firms we look after, and record the answers so they can see it move. One reading tells you where you stand today. It doesn't tell you which direction you're going.
11. Check the date on your last article or update.
If your insights page ends in 2021, every visitor can see that.
An empty blog is better than a blog that stopped.
12. Look for your privacy policy.
Can you find it in under ten seconds?
If you're collecting names and email addresses through a contact form, POPIA applies. Most firm websites we review either have no policy or one that describes a business they aren't.
What to do with what you found
| What you found | How urgent |
|---|---|
| Contact form not delivering | Today |
| Wrong practice area or firm name in copy | This week |
| Broken links, wrong destinations | This week |
| Homepage slower than 5 seconds | This month |
| No privacy policy | This month |
| Counters showing zero, stale dates, typos | Next time someone's in there |
Most of these take minutes to fix once somebody knows about them.
The problem was never that they were hard. It's that nobody was looking.
The other forty-eight checks
The twelve above find faults you can see. The rest of our audit finds the ones you can't:
| Technical | Certificate configuration and expiry, security headers, mixed content, console errors, image weight, redirect chains, 404 handling |
| Search | Duplicate page titles, missing meta descriptions, heading structure, structured data, indexing coverage, locale tags, alt text |
| Local | Profile completeness, category accuracy, name-address-phone consistency across the web, review volume and response rate |
| Compliance | POPIA policy accuracy, consent mechanism, data handling statements, LPC details, comparative claims |
| Maintenance | Platform and dependency currency, domain and certificate expiry dates, evidence of when the site was last genuinely touched |
None of those cost you a specific enquiry this week. Together they decide whether anyone finds you at all.
Send us your URL and we'll run the full sixty. You'll get the findings by email, with what each one means and how urgent it is. Free, whether you hire us or not.
Most firms get six to twelve findings.
Related guides
How to tell whether your contact form is actually working
Submit it yourself. Most firms never have. Here are the four ways a contact form fails without telling anybody.
Why your firm's website gets no enquiries
Five reasons, in order of how often we find them. It is almost never the design.
What POPIA requires on your law firm's website
Section 18 lists what you must tell people when you collect their information. A contact form collects their information.