January 27, 2025 • 18 mins
Pros & Cons of WordPress for Law Firms
Choosing WordPress for your law firm's website involves weighing significant benefits against notable drawbacks. While its flexibility, SEO options, and cost-effectiveness are appealing, learning curves, security risks, and performance issues demand careful consideration.
• Exploration of WordPress's benefits for law firms
• Discussion of SEO capabilities and local search features
• Review of potential challenges and drawbacks
• Emphasis on security measures and best practices
• Commentary on recent WordPress controversies and community issues
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to Legal Marketing 101.
I'm Toby Rosen.
You probably know or have heardthat WordPress powers like 40%
of the internet, but we need todig into whether or not it's
really the right fit for yourlaw firm.
Today we're diving into thepros and cons of WordPress and
we're going to talk a little bitabout the behind-the-scenes
WordPress drama that, if you'renot really plugged into the
(00:28):
community, you may not knowabout.
So first let's dive straight in.
Let's talk about the greatparts of using WordPress for law
firms.
When it comes to building awebsite for your law firm,
wordpress stands out becauseit's one of the top platforms.
But why is it such a popularchoice and why should you
consider it?
Let's jump straight into thebenefits.
(00:49):
First is flexibility andcustomization.
One of WordPress's biggeststrengths is its unparalleled
flexibility.
I would say that there areprobably some other options that
are maybe a little bit moreflexible, but WordPress can
really work like a blank canvasthat you can design almost
exactly how you want if you wantto.
There are thousands andthousands of themes and plugins,
(01:12):
so you're not just stuck with acouple of options, like you may
be on other providers.
I'm not going to name them here, but you know what their names
are.
You can create something fromscratch by completely custom
coding a theme, or you can buysomething off the shelf and make
it really personal so that itactually reflects who your firm
is and your personality and yourbrandings.
(01:34):
And this customization can go alittle bit further than just
how it looks.
If you need appointmentscheduling so that clients can
book consultations directly,there's a plugin for that.
Need a secure portal fordocument uploads, there's a
plugin for that.
Whether it's adding practicepages that are specific to
different types of law, oradding team pages that have the
(01:54):
same layout across dozens orhundreds of different team
members, even integratingchatbots to handle new queries,
or any of these things,WordPress makes it really easy
to add functionality as yourfirm evolves, and it gives you
the options to customize it sothat it's exactly what you want
it to be.
When I say customize, keep thatin mind, because, while that is
(02:17):
a huge benefit of WordPress,we're going to come back to that
Now.
The other big benefit and thisis again something that is
paralleled on a lot of otherplatforms, but WordPress gives
us a little bit more flexibilityhere Once again, that's the SEO
options If you want yourpotential clients to find you
online, you're going to need awebsite that works well with the
(02:37):
search engines and that givesyou the options you need to
improve.
Wordpress is great for thisbecause it has a bunch of
built-in SEO capabilities andit's compatible with tons of
powerful plugins like RankMathor very powerful, but not my
favorite Yoast SEO.
There are a lot of really goodoptions for SEO plugins.
I personally really likeRankMath, but these tools can
(03:00):
guide you in optimizing everyaspect of your site, from the
meta descriptions to the keywordusage to internal linking.
All of these things make itmuch easier for Google to
understand and rank your pages,and this is important because
you know that's the whole pointof SEO.
And when local SEO comes intoplay which we've talked about a
lot and we know it's reallycrucial for law firms, wordpress
(03:23):
makes it really easy tooptimize for local searches by
enabling Google Mapsintegrations and adding
structured data forlocation-specific services and
building in all the differenttypes of location-based content
that you're going to need torank well locally.
And by leveraging these tools,it makes it way easier for your
firm to climb the rankings andstand out, especially if the
(03:44):
market is particularlycompetitive.
And that leads us to our nextpoint, which is scalability.
If it's competitive and ifyou're scaling into new markets
whether you're a solo who wantsto do multiple markets or a
large firm with lots of officesand attorneys WordPress can grow
with you.
So if you're starting small,that's absolutely fine.
You can build a straightforwardwebsite and then start to add
(04:06):
on and expand functionality overtime.
As your firm grows.
You can add new features,create additional pages, and
WordPress hosts are usuallypretty good at scaling to handle
increased traffic withouthaving to switch platforms.
So if you're a firm that'sgoing to start with a single
page site but might later wantto blog or you might want to,
you know have a portal for yourpotential clients or for your
(04:28):
existing clients, with WordPressthese additions can happen all
in the background until they'reready to go, making the
transition seamless and allowingyour website to evolve
alongside your business.
But let's talk about cost,because WordPress is open source
, meaning the core software isfree.
Cost, because WordPress is opensource, meaning the core
(04:48):
software is free, and that mightsound like a really good idea,
but there are definitely somenumbers here.
It can reduce some of yourupfront expenses, especially
when you're comparing this toproprietary website billers that
you know, you have to startbuilding, and it takes three
months to build it and you'repaying a monthly fee for that.
Even with the premium themesand plugins, the cost of
(05:10):
WordPress is usually still lowerthan building a completely
custom website from scratch, too.
We have a framework that we'reworking with.
Usually, we can work with atheme to make things a little
bit easier, and even if you'regoing completely from scratch,
you're able to use WordPress'ssystem to create your own theme
so that you can quickly scale upwith new pages.
So in any development scenario,you're minimizing the actual
amount of coding that needs tobe done.
Plus, wordpress is reallyreally popular, and this means
(05:33):
there's a wealth of freeresources, tutorials, youtube
videos, podcasts and communitysupport that's available to you.
This can save you time andmoney on troubleshooting or
hiring expensive developers.
This can save you time andmoney on troubleshooting or
hiring expensive developers, buteven if you do need to hire a
developer because WordPress isPHP and it's so popular it'll be
easy to find one.
So, from flexibility to costeffectiveness, wordpress is a
(05:58):
really strong option and offersa bunch of advantages that, for
many law firms that are lookingto build up or start upgrading
their presence, wordpress mightbe the right choice, but that's
not the end of the story.
Now we have to talk about someof the cons of using WordPress
for law firm Because, look,there are undeniable advantages
here, but there are definitelysome challenges too, and if you
have a WordPress site and youwere listening to those first
(06:20):
few minutes, here's your funpart.
For law firms, whereprofessionalism, security and
efficiency are one of ourparamount concerns, these
potential drawbacks warrant aclose look.
We need to understand what thepotential drawbacks are and
really understand before we makethis decision about WordPress.
(06:41):
And the first big con here isthat there is a steep learning
curve.
Wordpress is, yes, veryflexible, preeminently
customizable, but this comeswith a price.
It is not the easiest platformto master and sometimes you need
to code.
So, unlike drag and dropbuilders like Wix or Squarespace
, or even slightly more complexthings like card, wordpress does
(07:04):
require some technicalknowledge to do things well.
So tasks like installing themes, customizing layouts,
troubleshooting issues some ofthis can feel pretty daunting if
you're brand new to websitemanagement.
For law firms that don't havein-house IT or web support, this
means you're probably going toneed to hire a developer to
handle setup and then ongoingmaintenance, and even with
(07:26):
professional help, you stillkind of need to familiarize
yourself with the platform sothat you can manage content
updates, minor tweaks and manageyour developer.
This learning curve can be kindof burdensome for small law
firms or solos if they'realready stretched thin and there
are some security risks.
This isn't as big of a riskwith some of the drag and drop
(07:46):
builders it's a little bit moreglobal with those guys.
But when it comes to WordPress,it's on us, and cybersecurity is
becoming a serious concern forany law firm.
And while WordPress does giveus some options to deal with
this, wordpress's popularityalso makes it a really frequent
target for hackers.
Vulnerabilities can arise fromoutdated plugins, weak passwords
(08:11):
, poorly configured hostingenvironments and a slew of other
annoying things.
And for a law firm where clientconfidentiality is critical, a
breach could have legal andreputational consequences,
especially when you have clientinformation coming in through
the website.
So to mitigate this, we justhave to stay proactive.
It's a burden, for sure, butit's relatively simple to solve.
First, we want to make surewe're regularly backing up and
(08:33):
updating our WordPress corethemes and plugins, and we want
to make sure we're using areputable hosting provider that
prioritizes security.
I recommend WP Engine.
I recommend WP Engine.
They're not the cheapest butthey have really strong support,
great security and, if you'reinterested, check out the link
in the show notes.
Then we want to make sure we'reinstalling security plugins
(08:54):
like WordFriends or Securi tomonitor the threats.
If we have enough traffic wherethere are issues and we're
getting spam and things likethat, these are options that can
help make sure we're lockingdown all the parts of our site
that could be an issue.
And, like I said in tip numberone, we need to make sure we're
backing up our site regularly tomake sure we have really quick
(09:15):
recovery if there's an issue.
So we always want to be makingsure we're backing up the site
when we do an update in casesomething fails and we can
revert.
But we also just want to have aregular backup going in case
there's a security issue.
And while these measures arepretty effective when it comes
to reducing the risks forsecurity, we use all of these
measures and we don't reallyhave any security issues these
(09:38):
things do require time andvigilance and this is something
that you know.
You're a busy lawyer.
It could be hard to find thetime.
One of the other big things thatis a complaint about WordPress
and personally, within RosenAdvertising and within my own
experience, it's not aparticularly big challenge, but
this is an issue that comes up alot and that is performance
issues, and it's not what you'rethinking of.
(10:00):
This is related to the speed ofyour website, but a slow
website it can be frustrating,just like other performance
issues can be, and ultimatelythis hurts your search engine
rankings.
Unfortunately, performanceissues, they're pretty common.
Wordpress and patting it on theback doesn't really seem to
help.
What usually is going on isthat there's a poorly optimized
(10:20):
theme or plugin and essentiallythe amount of code we have on
the website is just getting alittle bit bloated.
And when every second counts inretaining a visitor, sluggish
load times equate to lostbusiness.
That's just sort of the story.
Many law firms fall into thetrap of just overloading their
site with features.
This starts to bloat the site,make the package that it has to
(10:42):
send to the user much larger,and it slows everything down.
So this is things like addingmultiple plugins for small tasks
Think image galleries, formbuilders, carousels, social
media integrations.
All of this works together tostrain your server's resources
and what we want to do tomaintain a fast website we can
(11:02):
focus on a couple of things.
First is choosing lightweight,high-performance themes or
making sure we customize ourtheme to get rid of any
non-essential code, and then wecan focus on using only the
essential plugins.
If we can get one plugin to dotwo things, that's great, but we
want to really focus on thethings that are actually adding
value to the site andeliminating the things that
(11:23):
aren't.
And finally, we make sure weoptimize our images and then
enable caching through pluginslike WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache
.
I personally love WP Rocket,but it can be a little
aggressive at times.
But even with theseoptimizations, firms may still
need some kind of professionalsupport to diagnose and resolve
more complex performancebottlenecks, and this is a big
(11:45):
challenge and a big timeconsumer.
And that leads us to anotherpoint, which is the overwhelming
number of choices.
One of WordPress' greateststrengths we talked about the
flexibility and thecustomization is this vast
library of themes and plugin,but this can also be WordPress'
Achilles heel.
With so many options available,it's really easy to start
(12:06):
feeling overwhelmed.
How do you know which pluginfor contact forms is best
Gravity Forms or Cognito orContact Form 7?
Or which theme actually alignswith my brand but is also fast
and has the options I want forfuture scale.
This choice paralysis can leadto complete indecision or worse,
selecting options that justdon't work well together and
(12:28):
wasting money, and for law firms, this is just wasted time,
wasted resources, and this isparticularly true if you end up
needing to backtrack and replacethese poorly chosen tools.
So I don't want this to soundlike a sales episode, but if
you're considering WordPress,you do want to consider
consulting with a developer or aWordPress expert specifically,
(12:50):
who understands the unique needsof law firms.
They can recommend solutionsthat are proven to work and they
can help steer you clear of anyof the common pitfalls.
Wordpress isn't anout-of-the-box,
one-size-fits-all solution, andthese challenges show us why
careful planning and ongoingmanagement of the site are
really essential.
But now let's talk about the funpart.
(13:11):
There's been a little bit ofdrama around WordPress, a little
bit of controversy, and let'stalk about what this means for
law firms that are looking touse the platform, because it's
not a big deal, but you shouldknow what's going on.
So, first up is the Gutenbergeditor controversy the Gutenberg
editor, which you may have seenin your WordPress site, which
(13:31):
was introduced in 2018, this wasone of the big shifts in
WordPress's history.
This block-based editing systemwas designed to make content
creation a lot more intuitive,visually appealing and help it
compete with platforms likeSquarespace.
However, the transition fromthe classic editor was not
really universally welcomed.
For a lot of users, especiallypeople like me and those that
(13:54):
are accustomed to the oldinterface, gutenberg introduced
a bunch of unnecessarycomplexity.
Tasks that took a couple ofclicks or some coding suddenly
felt a lot more difficult.
And on the flip side, therewere supporters of Gutenberg
that said, hey, this is moremodern, it's future-proof, it's
got a lot better design,flexibility doesn't require
custom coding and it's going tobring more people to WordPress
(14:16):
and for law firms.
For us, this shift raised a keyquestion Does Gutenberg
actually improve our efficiencyor does it slow the team down?
But the story didn't end there.
One of WordPress's otherstrengths its really vast plugin
ecosystem has sparked somecontroversy as well.
As developers are shifting moretowards subscription-based
pricing models, the costs ofmany of the essential plugins
(14:39):
that WordPress users use haverisen significantly.
This trend has frustrated a lotof users, who feel locked into
paying recurring fees forfunctionality that they
previously had with one-timepurchases, and some plugins are
being accused of some shadypractices like bundling
unnecessary features or failingto disclose ownership changes,
(14:59):
and these issues lead to a lackof transparency, which makes it
harder for us, as purchasers, totrust the tools that we rely on
to run our businesses.
What we need to do here isreally just vet our plugins and
vet our software.
It's the same thing we're doingwith all the software we run in
the business, but it'ssomething that we're just doing
a little bit extra of withWordPress.
(15:20):
And finally, there's one morebig piece of drama, and that's
between the company that ownsthe trademark for WordPress
Automatic, and a hosting companythat I really like and have
mentioned, wp Engine.
Now, I'm not going to share myopinion on this, but there's a
lot of debate around this, andI'm going to read from user
(15:42):
David Fry on Reddit about theWordPress drama over the last
couple of months and what'sgoing on.
David says that person is namedMatt and he's one of the
co-founders.
While we've all thought of thisas a community project, matt
has a company Automatic and anonprofit that plays key roles
(16:05):
in the situation.
There are many companies thatspecialize in hosting WordPress
websites and Automatic is one ofthem, but one of their biggest
competitors is WP Engine.
Automatic holds the trademarkfor WordPress, but everyone has
been allowed to use WordPress intheir branding.
The way the law works if youdon't defend a trademark, it can
be difficult to enforce in thefuture.
While Automatic probablycouldn't win a trademark lawsuit
(16:28):
against WP Engine, they werehoping to pressure WP Engine to
pay 8% of their revenue toAutomatic.
Then, when WP Engine refused,matt from Automatic went
ballistic and is engaged in adaily campaign of attacks
against WP Engine, who are nowsuing Matt and Automatic.
On there that one company seemsto be annoyed at the other
(17:01):
company for using their branding.
But, as we've seen, wordpressbranding has been used all
across the internet, so perhapsthe lawyers here can give me a
little bit more informationabout the likely outcomes.
This is what the internet thinksof it at this point and,
frankly, my opinion is let's allget back to work.
But I don't write the rules forinternet debates and,
unfortunately, I don't think anyof you do either.
Now, why should you care aboutany of this?
(17:23):
Because whatever choice youmake here, whether it's
embracing WordPress andGutenberg or going to the
plugins and using the classiceditor all of this affects your
WordPress sites performance,usability and costs, and
understanding what thecontroversies are like and how
the community is shifting andwhat potential risks there are
to using this platform, isreally critical to ensuring that
(17:46):
you can adapt to what happensand make decisions that align
with your firm's goals.
Wordpress is going to remain apowerful tool unless something
completely crazy happens in thenext few months, but
understanding this evolvinglandscape is really critical
when it comes to leveraging thiseffectively for your practice.
As I've said, I personally am abig fan of WordPress.
We're not stopping anytime soon, but for today, that's it for
(18:09):
Legal Marketing 101.
Check out RosenAdvertisingcomfor more Thanks.
Welcome to Legal Marketing 101.
I'm Toby Rosen.
You probably know or have heardthat WordPress powers like 40%
of the internet, but we need todig into whether or not it's
really the right fit for yourlaw firm.
Today we're diving into thepros and cons of WordPress and
we're going to talk a little bitabout the behind-the-scenes
WordPress drama that, if you'renot really plugged into the
(00:28):
community, you may not knowabout.
So first let's dive straight in.
Let's talk about the greatparts of using WordPress for law
firms.
When it comes to building awebsite for your law firm,
wordpress stands out becauseit's one of the top platforms.
But why is it such a popularchoice and why should you
consider it?
Let's jump straight into thebenefits.
(00:49):
First is flexibility andcustomization.
One of WordPress's biggeststrengths is its unparalleled
flexibility.
I would say that there areprobably some other options that
are maybe a little bit moreflexible, but WordPress can
really work like a blank canvasthat you can design almost
exactly how you want if you wantto.
There are thousands andthousands of themes and plugins,
(01:12):
so you're not just stuck with acouple of options, like you may
be on other providers.
I'm not going to name them here, but you know what their names
are.
You can create something fromscratch by completely custom
coding a theme, or you can buysomething off the shelf and make
it really personal so that itactually reflects who your firm
is and your personality and yourbrandings.
(01:34):
And this customization can go alittle bit further than just
how it looks.
If you need appointmentscheduling so that clients can
book consultations directly,there's a plugin for that.
Need a secure portal fordocument uploads, there's a
plugin for that.
Whether it's adding practicepages that are specific to
different types of law, oradding team pages that have the
(01:54):
same layout across dozens orhundreds of different team
members, even integratingchatbots to handle new queries,
or any of these things,WordPress makes it really easy
to add functionality as yourfirm evolves, and it gives you
the options to customize it sothat it's exactly what you want
it to be.
When I say customize, keep thatin mind, because, while that is
(02:17):
a huge benefit of WordPress,we're going to come back to that
Now.
The other big benefit and thisis again something that is
paralleled on a lot of otherplatforms, but WordPress gives
us a little bit more flexibilityhere Once again, that's the SEO
options If you want yourpotential clients to find you
online, you're going to need awebsite that works well with the
(02:37):
search engines and that givesyou the options you need to
improve.
Wordpress is great for thisbecause it has a bunch of
built-in SEO capabilities andit's compatible with tons of
powerful plugins like RankMathor very powerful, but not my
favorite Yoast SEO.
There are a lot of really goodoptions for SEO plugins.
I personally really likeRankMath, but these tools can
(03:00):
guide you in optimizing everyaspect of your site, from the
meta descriptions to the keywordusage to internal linking.
All of these things make itmuch easier for Google to
understand and rank your pages,and this is important because
you know that's the whole pointof SEO.
And when local SEO comes intoplay which we've talked about a
lot and we know it's reallycrucial for law firms, wordpress
(03:23):
makes it really easy tooptimize for local searches by
enabling Google Mapsintegrations and adding
structured data forlocation-specific services and
building in all the differenttypes of location-based content
that you're going to need torank well locally.
And by leveraging these tools,it makes it way easier for your
firm to climb the rankings andstand out, especially if the
(03:44):
market is particularlycompetitive.
And that leads us to our nextpoint, which is scalability.
If it's competitive and ifyou're scaling into new markets
whether you're a solo who wantsto do multiple markets or a
large firm with lots of officesand attorneys WordPress can grow
with you.
So if you're starting small,that's absolutely fine.
You can build a straightforwardwebsite and then start to add
(04:06):
on and expand functionality overtime.
As your firm grows.
You can add new features,create additional pages, and
WordPress hosts are usuallypretty good at scaling to handle
increased traffic withouthaving to switch platforms.
So if you're a firm that'sgoing to start with a single
page site but might later wantto blog or you might want to,
you know have a portal for yourpotential clients or for your
(04:28):
existing clients, with WordPressthese additions can happen all
in the background until they'reready to go, making the
transition seamless and allowingyour website to evolve
alongside your business.
But let's talk about cost,because WordPress is open source
, meaning the core software isfree.
Cost, because WordPress is opensource, meaning the core
(04:48):
software is free, and that mightsound like a really good idea,
but there are definitely somenumbers here.
It can reduce some of yourupfront expenses, especially
when you're comparing this toproprietary website billers that
you know, you have to startbuilding, and it takes three
months to build it and you'repaying a monthly fee for that.
Even with the premium themesand plugins, the cost of
(05:10):
WordPress is usually still lowerthan building a completely
custom website from scratch, too.
We have a framework that we'reworking with.
Usually, we can work with atheme to make things a little
bit easier, and even if you'regoing completely from scratch,
you're able to use WordPress'ssystem to create your own theme
so that you can quickly scale upwith new pages.
So in any development scenario,you're minimizing the actual
amount of coding that needs tobe done.
Plus, wordpress is reallyreally popular, and this means
(05:33):
there's a wealth of freeresources, tutorials, youtube
videos, podcasts and communitysupport that's available to you.
This can save you time andmoney on troubleshooting or
hiring expensive developers.
This can save you time andmoney on troubleshooting or
hiring expensive developers, buteven if you do need to hire a
developer because WordPress isPHP and it's so popular it'll be
easy to find one.
So, from flexibility to costeffectiveness, wordpress is a
(05:58):
really strong option and offersa bunch of advantages that, for
many law firms that are lookingto build up or start upgrading
their presence, wordpress mightbe the right choice, but that's
not the end of the story.
Now we have to talk about someof the cons of using WordPress
for law firm Because, look,there are undeniable advantages
here, but there are definitelysome challenges too, and if you
have a WordPress site and youwere listening to those first
(06:20):
few minutes, here's your funpart.
For law firms, whereprofessionalism, security and
efficiency are one of ourparamount concerns, these
potential drawbacks warrant aclose look.
We need to understand what thepotential drawbacks are and
really understand before we makethis decision about WordPress.
(06:41):
And the first big con here isthat there is a steep learning
curve.
Wordpress is, yes, veryflexible, preeminently
customizable, but this comeswith a price.
It is not the easiest platformto master and sometimes you need
to code.
So, unlike drag and dropbuilders like Wix or Squarespace
, or even slightly more complexthings like card, wordpress does
(07:04):
require some technicalknowledge to do things well.
So tasks like installing themes, customizing layouts,
troubleshooting issues some ofthis can feel pretty daunting if
you're brand new to websitemanagement.
For law firms that don't havein-house IT or web support, this
means you're probably going toneed to hire a developer to
handle setup and then ongoingmaintenance, and even with
(07:26):
professional help, you stillkind of need to familiarize
yourself with the platform sothat you can manage content
updates, minor tweaks and manageyour developer.
This learning curve can be kindof burdensome for small law
firms or solos if they'realready stretched thin and there
are some security risks.
This isn't as big of a riskwith some of the drag and drop
(07:46):
builders it's a little bit moreglobal with those guys.
But when it comes to WordPress,it's on us, and cybersecurity is
becoming a serious concern forany law firm.
And while WordPress does giveus some options to deal with
this, wordpress's popularityalso makes it a really frequent
target for hackers.
Vulnerabilities can arise fromoutdated plugins, weak passwords
(08:11):
, poorly configured hostingenvironments and a slew of other
annoying things.
And for a law firm where clientconfidentiality is critical, a
breach could have legal andreputational consequences,
especially when you have clientinformation coming in through
the website.
So to mitigate this, we justhave to stay proactive.
It's a burden, for sure, butit's relatively simple to solve.
First, we want to make surewe're regularly backing up and
(08:33):
updating our WordPress corethemes and plugins, and we want
to make sure we're using areputable hosting provider that
prioritizes security.
I recommend WP Engine.
I recommend WP Engine.
They're not the cheapest butthey have really strong support,
great security and, if you'reinterested, check out the link
in the show notes.
Then we want to make sure we'reinstalling security plugins
(08:54):
like WordFriends or Securi tomonitor the threats.
If we have enough traffic wherethere are issues and we're
getting spam and things likethat, these are options that can
help make sure we're lockingdown all the parts of our site
that could be an issue.
And, like I said in tip numberone, we need to make sure we're
backing up our site regularly tomake sure we have really quick
(09:15):
recovery if there's an issue.
So we always want to be makingsure we're backing up the site
when we do an update in casesomething fails and we can
revert.
But we also just want to have aregular backup going in case
there's a security issue.
And while these measures arepretty effective when it comes
to reducing the risks forsecurity, we use all of these
measures and we don't reallyhave any security issues these
(09:38):
things do require time andvigilance and this is something
that you know.
You're a busy lawyer.
It could be hard to find thetime.
One of the other big things thatis a complaint about WordPress
and personally, within RosenAdvertising and within my own
experience, it's not aparticularly big challenge, but
this is an issue that comes up alot and that is performance
issues, and it's not what you'rethinking of.
(10:00):
This is related to the speed ofyour website, but a slow
website it can be frustrating,just like other performance
issues can be, and ultimatelythis hurts your search engine
rankings.
Unfortunately, performanceissues, they're pretty common.
Wordpress and patting it on theback doesn't really seem to
help.
What usually is going on isthat there's a poorly optimized
(10:20):
theme or plugin and essentiallythe amount of code we have on
the website is just getting alittle bit bloated.
And when every second counts inretaining a visitor, sluggish
load times equate to lostbusiness.
That's just sort of the story.
Many law firms fall into thetrap of just overloading their
site with features.
This starts to bloat the site,make the package that it has to
(10:42):
send to the user much larger,and it slows everything down.
So this is things like addingmultiple plugins for small tasks
Think image galleries, formbuilders, carousels, social
media integrations.
All of this works together tostrain your server's resources
and what we want to do tomaintain a fast website we can
(11:02):
focus on a couple of things.
First is choosing lightweight,high-performance themes or
making sure we customize ourtheme to get rid of any
non-essential code, and then wecan focus on using only the
essential plugins.
If we can get one plugin to dotwo things, that's great, but we
want to really focus on thethings that are actually adding
value to the site andeliminating the things that
(11:23):
aren't.
And finally, we make sure weoptimize our images and then
enable caching through pluginslike WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache
.
I personally love WP Rocket,but it can be a little
aggressive at times.
But even with theseoptimizations, firms may still
need some kind of professionalsupport to diagnose and resolve
more complex performancebottlenecks, and this is a big
(11:45):
challenge and a big timeconsumer.
And that leads us to anotherpoint, which is the overwhelming
number of choices.
One of WordPress' greateststrengths we talked about the
flexibility and thecustomization is this vast
library of themes and plugin,but this can also be WordPress'
Achilles heel.
With so many options available,it's really easy to start
(12:06):
feeling overwhelmed.
How do you know which pluginfor contact forms is best
Gravity Forms or Cognito orContact Form 7?
Or which theme actually alignswith my brand but is also fast
and has the options I want forfuture scale.
This choice paralysis can leadto complete indecision or worse,
selecting options that justdon't work well together and
(12:28):
wasting money, and for law firms, this is just wasted time,
wasted resources, and this isparticularly true if you end up
needing to backtrack and replacethese poorly chosen tools.
So I don't want this to soundlike a sales episode, but if
you're considering WordPress,you do want to consider
consulting with a developer or aWordPress expert specifically,
(12:50):
who understands the unique needsof law firms.
They can recommend solutionsthat are proven to work and they
can help steer you clear of anyof the common pitfalls.
Wordpress isn't anout-of-the-box,
one-size-fits-all solution, andthese challenges show us why
careful planning and ongoingmanagement of the site are
really essential.
But now let's talk about the funpart.
(13:11):
There's been a little bit ofdrama around WordPress, a little
bit of controversy, and let'stalk about what this means for
law firms that are looking touse the platform, because it's
not a big deal, but you shouldknow what's going on.
So, first up is the Gutenbergeditor controversy the Gutenberg
editor, which you may have seenin your WordPress site, which
(13:31):
was introduced in 2018, this wasone of the big shifts in
WordPress's history.
This block-based editing systemwas designed to make content
creation a lot more intuitive,visually appealing and help it
compete with platforms likeSquarespace.
However, the transition fromthe classic editor was not
really universally welcomed.
For a lot of users, especiallypeople like me and those that
(13:54):
are accustomed to the oldinterface, gutenberg introduced
a bunch of unnecessarycomplexity.
Tasks that took a couple ofclicks or some coding suddenly
felt a lot more difficult.
And on the flip side, therewere supporters of Gutenberg
that said, hey, this is moremodern, it's future-proof, it's
got a lot better design,flexibility doesn't require
custom coding and it's going tobring more people to WordPress
(14:16):
and for law firms.
For us, this shift raised a keyquestion Does Gutenberg
actually improve our efficiencyor does it slow the team down?
But the story didn't end there.
One of WordPress's otherstrengths its really vast plugin
ecosystem has sparked somecontroversy as well.
As developers are shifting moretowards subscription-based
pricing models, the costs ofmany of the essential plugins
(14:39):
that WordPress users use haverisen significantly.
This trend has frustrated a lotof users, who feel locked into
paying recurring fees forfunctionality that they
previously had with one-timepurchases, and some plugins are
being accused of some shadypractices like bundling
unnecessary features or failingto disclose ownership changes,
(14:59):
and these issues lead to a lackof transparency, which makes it
harder for us, as purchasers, totrust the tools that we rely on
to run our businesses.
What we need to do here isreally just vet our plugins and
vet our software.
It's the same thing we're doingwith all the software we run in
the business, but it'ssomething that we're just doing
a little bit extra of withWordPress.
(15:20):
And finally, there's one morebig piece of drama, and that's
between the company that ownsthe trademark for WordPress
Automatic, and a hosting companythat I really like and have
mentioned, wp Engine.
Now, I'm not going to share myopinion on this, but there's a
lot of debate around this, andI'm going to read from user
(15:42):
David Fry on Reddit about theWordPress drama over the last
couple of months and what'sgoing on.
David says that person is namedMatt and he's one of the
co-founders.
While we've all thought of thisas a community project, matt
has a company Automatic and anonprofit that plays key roles
(16:05):
in the situation.
There are many companies thatspecialize in hosting WordPress
websites and Automatic is one ofthem, but one of their biggest
competitors is WP Engine.
Automatic holds the trademarkfor WordPress, but everyone has
been allowed to use WordPress intheir branding.
The way the law works if youdon't defend a trademark, it can
be difficult to enforce in thefuture.
While Automatic probablycouldn't win a trademark lawsuit
(16:28):
against WP Engine, they werehoping to pressure WP Engine to
pay 8% of their revenue toAutomatic.
Then, when WP Engine refused,matt from Automatic went
ballistic and is engaged in adaily campaign of attacks
against WP Engine, who are nowsuing Matt and Automatic.
On there that one company seemsto be annoyed at the other
(17:01):
company for using their branding.
But, as we've seen, wordpressbranding has been used all
across the internet, so perhapsthe lawyers here can give me a
little bit more informationabout the likely outcomes.
This is what the internet thinksof it at this point and,
frankly, my opinion is let's allget back to work.
But I don't write the rules forinternet debates and,
unfortunately, I don't think anyof you do either.
Now, why should you care aboutany of this?
(17:23):
Because whatever choice youmake here, whether it's
embracing WordPress andGutenberg or going to the
plugins and using the classiceditor all of this affects your
WordPress sites performance,usability and costs, and
understanding what thecontroversies are like and how
the community is shifting andwhat potential risks there are
to using this platform, isreally critical to ensuring that
(17:46):
you can adapt to what happensand make decisions that align
with your firm's goals.
Wordpress is going to remain apowerful tool unless something
completely crazy happens in thenext few months, but
understanding this evolvinglandscape is really critical
when it comes to leveraging thiseffectively for your practice.
As I've said, I personally am abig fan of WordPress.
We're not stopping anytime soon, but for today, that's it for
(18:09):
Legal Marketing 101.
Check out RosenAdvertisingcomfor more Thanks.
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