Sunday evening, two website quotes sit open on the kitchen table. One is a flat build fee. The other is a monthly payment on a two-year term. Neither says who writes the Spanish pages, or where the old addresses Google already knows will point.
Owners on r/LawFirm have sat at that table. One put a quoted site at “around $8,000, not to mention the on going maintenance and hosting fees” (r/LawFirm). Another wrote that “$10k+ for a website seems like robbery” (r/LawFirm).
Here are the prices a firm with 1 to 10 lawyers meets in 2026, from four kinds of vendor. Each number comes from the vendor’s own page unless a third-party listing is named beside it, and prices move, so open the page before you compare. After the prices come the lines a quote tends to leave out, which is where an affordable site turns expensive.
Do-it-yourself builders
A builder rents you templates, hosting and an editor. Squarespace’s pricing page lists plans from $25 to $139 a month when billed monthly, with lower rates on a yearly plan.
The subscription is the small part. Someone at your firm writes the page for each area of law you take, shoots the headshots, connects the contact form to the right inbox and keeps the hours and fees current. If that someone is a partner, count those evenings at the partner’s hourly rate before you call this the cheap option.
Law-firm template sites
Template vendors sell a layout drawn for law firms, with your words and photos dropped in. Justia’s own website-plans page starts sites at $82.50 a month when paid annually, and its four tiers are set by how many lawyer profiles the site carries: 1, 3, 5 or 12.
FindLaw quotes on request. A third-party listing, lawshun.com, reports about $500 a month for an eight-page template site on a 12-month term. With any template, ask how far it bends: one more practice area, a second office, a Spanish version of the intake page.
Custom builds from an agency
An agency designs the site for your firm alone, writes or edits the words, and builds it on WordPress or on a system of its own. The two r/LawFirm owners above were quoted $8,000, and $10,000 and up, for the build.
Some agencies spread the build across a monthly fee instead. Grow Law Firm’s pricing page lists website design from $599 a month. Juris Digital’s JurisPage starter package, on its own page, has no upfront setup fee and spreads the cost over a 24-month term. A third-party listing, Clutch, shows Consultwebs projects from $5,000.
Whatever the format, ask what the build includes. Writing, photos, the booking and intake forms, and routing each form to whoever does intake are often quoted apart, or left off entirely.
Monthly retainers that bundle SEO
The largest monthly bills pair the site with search work and, often, ad management. Grow Law Firm lists SEO from $2,500 a month, paid advertising from $1,150, and all three together from $4,299 (pricing page). Juris Digital’s paid-search management costs 20% of the ad spend each month, and setting it up carries its own fee.
Rankings.io and LawRank publish no prices; a third-party listing, Gartner Digital Markets, puts each at $5,000 a month and up. Scorpion publishes no price either. Whoever runs the ads, the clicks are a second bill, paid to Google or Meta. Before you set a retainer beside a build price, multiply it out: $2,500 a month is $30,000 a year, before ad spend.
Hosting, upkeep and the edits that follow
A build price covers launch day. After it come hosting, security updates, backups and the yearly domain renewal. On WordPress, add plugin updates, which break pages when nobody applies them. Ask, too, who answers when the site goes down on a Saturday morning.
Then the edits: a new associate, a changed consultation fee, an office that moved, an answer to the question callers keep asking. Ask how many edits the monthly fee covers, how fast they go up, and the hourly rate past that. A firm billed for every change sends fewer of them, and the site falls behind the firm.
Pages for practice areas, offices and attorneys
Quotes count pages, and a small firm needs more than it expects. Four practice areas and two offices already make a home page, four practice-area pages, two office pages and a contact page, before a single attorney bio.
An office page wants the street address, a local number and that office’s own booking calendar. Each bio needs bar admissions, education and a headshot taken this decade. Ask how many pages the price covers, what page nine costs, whether bios count as pages, and who writes the words. A template with sample text in it is not a finished practice-area page.
Spanish pages, phone speed and accessibility
If your firm takes Spanish-speaking callers, they should land on pages written in Spanish for those practice areas, not English run through a translation widget. Ask who writes them and whether they’re priced per page.
Plenty of potential clients find you on a phone, in a parking lot or a hospital waiting room. Open three of the vendor’s live client sites on your own phone over cell data, and count the seconds until you can tap to call. Then fill in the contact form on that phone and ask where it went: an inbox someone watches, or nowhere in particular.
Accessibility belongs in the build: real headings, alt text on every image, contrast that reads in sunlight, forms that work from a keyboard. Ask which standard the vendor builds to, whether anyone outside checked it, and whether it lives in the pages or in a widget added on top.
Moving the old site without losing rankings
Your current site has addresses Google already ranks: the car-accident page, the divorce page, the blog post that still brings in calls. A new site that changes those addresses without redirects starts over in search.
Before you sign, ask for three things: a crawl of every old address, a map pairing every old address with its new home, and a look at Google Search Console in the week after launch. Keep addresses unchanged wherever you can, and move the words that already rank instead of rewriting them. A firm with years of blog posts has the most to lose in this step.
Contract length, and who holds the accounts
Terms differ more than prices do. JurisPage runs 24 months; the third-party listing above puts FindLaw’s template site on 12; others bill by the month. Read what leaving costs in month seven, before month one.
Then check whose name is on everything. Google Ads, Analytics, Search Console and the Business Profile should sit in accounts your firm owns, with the vendor added as a user. The five questions at the end of this post cover the rest.
Where RetainerBooked fits
RetainerBooked is intake software for US law firms with 1 to 10 lawyers, and the website is included in what your firm pays each month. Our team designs, writes, builds and hosts it, with a page per practice area and per office, a bio page for each attorney from the headshots you send, and Spanish pages for the practice areas where you take Spanish callers.
Each page is arranged for a small screen, built with real headings, image descriptions and readable contrast in mind, and carries the booking widget, the chat window and a pay link. Old pages we rebuild keep their addresses, and their words move over. Edits are unlimited: you email the change and we make it. Every ad account we work in is registered to your firm.
None of it is an add-on. Your monthly bill turns on how many people at your firm sign in, beginning at $97 for a solo, and there’s no term: it bills month to month. For the details, read how we build your firm’s website and every plan and its price.
RetainerBooked
RetainerBooked builds the websites and runs the intake and marketing for US law firms with 1 to 10 lawyers. Prices in this post come from each vendor’s own page or a named listing.
