What a website audit actually finds (and what to do with it)
A website audit is a structured pass through every part of a site looking for the things that hurt traffic, conversion, or trust. Done well, it surfaces 5–8 critical issues a solo firm can fix in an afternoon — and most of them carry a 20–40% conversion lift when fixed.
This isn't a 200-point SEO agency audit. Those are exhaustive but most of the points don't move the needle for solo practices. This is a 25-point audit, prioritized by impact, that one attorney can run on their own site in 90 minutes.
Print this, open your site, open your phone, open Google Search Console, and go through the list. Mark each item pass / fix-now / fix-later. The fix-now items get done this week.
Section 1 — Above the fold (first 600px of every page)
1. Headline names the practice area and service area in plain English? ("Probate Attorney in Cleveland Ohio" — not "Excellence in Legal Services")
2. One primary CTA visible above the fold? ("Get a free probate cost estimate" or "Book a 15-minute consult")
3. Phone number visible and click-to-call enabled on mobile?
4. Calculator or other interactive content above the fold or one scroll down?
5. Trust signals (years of experience, bar admission, key practice areas) visible without scrolling?
Most law firm sites fail items 1, 2, and 4. Generic "professional and experienced" headlines, no clear primary CTA, no interactive content. These three are the highest-leverage fixes in the audit.
Section 2 — Mobile experience
Open your site on your actual phone. Not the device-emulator in Chrome devtools. Your phone. Then:
6. Does the page load in under 3 seconds on cellular? (Test on LTE, not your home wifi.)
7. Are tap targets (buttons, links) at least 48×48 pixels?
8. Does horizontal scroll exist anywhere on the page? (It shouldn't.)
9. Is the primary CTA visible above the fold on mobile (top 600px)?
10. Do forms work — keyboards appear, fields are reachable, submit succeeds?
44% of legal traffic comes from mobile in 2026 (industry data). A site broken on mobile is losing nearly half its addressable audience. This section catches the most common mobile failures.
Section 3 — Core Web Vitals and load speed
Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and three top service pages. Check:
11. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) under 2.5s? (Anything over 4s is broken.)
12. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1? (If text/images jump as the page loads, visitors leave.)
13. Total Blocking Time (TBT) under 200ms? (Heavy JavaScript chokes mobile.)
Slow load is the #1 mechanical conversion killer — every 1-second delay correlates with a ~10% bounce rate increase. Common culprits: unoptimized images (>500KB each), heavy chat widgets, tracking pixels loaded synchronously, third-party fonts blocking render.
Section 4 — SEO basics
Pull up Google Search Console for your domain. Check:
14. Does every important page have a unique title tag under 60 characters?
15. Does every page have a unique meta description under 160 characters?
16. Does every page have exactly one H1?
17. Is LegalService or Attorney schema markup present on at least the homepage and primary practice-area pages?
18. Are there 3+ internal links from every page to other relevant pages on the site?
19. Does the site have a sitemap.xml submitted to Search Console?
20. Are there 0 broken internal links? (Use Screaming Frog free version up to 500 URLs.)
These items each take 5–15 minutes to fix and collectively lift organic visibility within 2–4 weeks of indexing.
Section 5 — Conversion infrastructure
21. Is there a calculator or interactive content piece on the site? (Probate cost, executor fee, settlement estimator — anything that gives the visitor a number in exchange for their email.)
22. Does the contact form have 3 or fewer fields? (Name, email/phone, case type. Every extra field drops conversion ~7%.)
23. Is there a direct calendar booking link (Calendly, SavvyCal) connected to the contact form's thank-you page?
24. Is the response-time target documented and tracked? (5-minute response = ~400% conversion lift per LexGro 2026.)
25. Does the firm have a Google Business Profile that's optimized? (See GBP guide.)
The single biggest miss across solo attorney sites is item 21. Most sites have no calculator, no interactive tool, nothing for the visitor to engage with. Adding a free probate calculator embed lifts visitor-to-email conversion from 1–2% to 8–12%.
How to prioritize fixes
After running the audit, you'll have a list of 5–15 issues. Rank them by:
- Impact × ease of fix. A broken mobile CTA is high-impact, easy fix — do it today. A site-wide load-speed overhaul is high-impact, hard fix — schedule it.
- Conversion vs SEO. Conversion fixes pay off immediately. SEO fixes pay off in 2–8 weeks. Do conversion fixes first if you're getting traffic but not leads.
- Compound effects. Adding a calculator to a service page lifts both conversion and SEO ranking. Those are the high-leverage fixes.
Don't try to do all 25 items in one weekend. Pick the top 5, fix them this week, measure the lift for 30 days, then run the audit again and tackle the next 5.
Once the audit is done, the natural next question is what the site is actually worth as an asset — you can estimate what your firm's website is worth based on traffic, age, and revenue per visit.
When to hire an agency vs DIY the audit
Most of this checklist is DIY-able by an attorney in 90 minutes. Three signs you actually need an agency:
- Site is on a platform you can't edit yourself (custom-built without a CMS, or a hosted platform with limited customization).
- Technical SEO issues beyond title tags — site architecture, crawlability, indexation problems, JavaScript rendering issues.
- Significant traffic but low conversion — when the audit comes back "everything looks fine" but the numbers don't reconcile, a fresh expert pair of eyes finds what you can't.
For most solo practices, the audit + a few hours of cleanup work delivers 80% of the gain at 5% of the cost of an agency engagement.
Disclaimer: This article is for general educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Made For Law is not a law firm, and our team are not attorneys. We are not affiliated with any federal, state, county, or local government agency or court system. Content may be researched or drafted with AI assistance and is reviewed by our editorial team before publication. Laws change frequently — always verify information with official sources and consult a licensed attorney for advice specific to your situation. Full disclaimer
- PageSpeed Insightspagespeed.web.dev
- estimate what your firm's website is worthrealsiteworth.com
Alex Tarlescu is co-founder of Made For Law — the SaaS platform that gives attorneys embeddable legal calculators with built-in lead capture. He's also co-founder of Good Smart Idea, the sister marketing agency that handles broader marketing engagements for law firms. Based in Cleveland with nearly 20 years of experience in sales, digital marketing, and AI automation, he writes about marketing — not legal advice — and the systems that turn website visitors into signed clients.
