What a Law Firm Website Actually Costs — and Who Ends Up Owning It

Published 2026 guides converge reasonably well once you separate the tiers. A templated or semi-custom site for a solo or small firm sits around $1,000 to $5,000. Most small and mid-sized firms land between $3,000 and $10,000. A mid-size firm going through a legal marketing agency is commonly quoted $8,000 to $30,000, and large firms with many practice areas and custom design can pass $100,000. Underneath all of it, ongoing costs of $400 to $1,500 a month are described as normal, with hosting and maintenance alone running $1,200 to $6,000 a year. Those monthlies are usually the last number mentioned and the largest over any three-year period.

For law firms specifically it is rarely the visual design. It is page count, and page count is set by two things: how many practice areas need their own page, and how many attorneys need a bio. A firm doing family law, criminal defence and estate planning needs three to six distinct practice-area pages, each with its own content written for how people actually search that area. Add partner bios, each of which is genuinely load-bearing — for many visitors the bio is the second page they open and the one that decides the call. Then content: published figures put professional copywriting at $500 to $6,000, and headshots at $200 to $500 a session. None of that is design, and all of it is cost.

Here is the part most of these articles skip, and there is a reason they skip it. An independent breakdown of legal web pricing this year made the point bluntly: agencies routinely hold the CMS, the hosting, the code and the domain configuration, while the firm pours three years of content and backlinks into it believing it is building its own asset. The day the firm tries to move, the site stays. Three years of search equity leaves with the relationship. The same piece noted the obvious conflict — the people writing "how much does a website cost" articles are frequently the same agencies running that arrangement. So ask, before signing: who is the registered domain holder, whose name is on the hosting account, and does the code transfer on final payment. Our post on who actually owns your website goes through why the answers are so often not what people assume.

Worth flagging because the exposure is specific. A firm advising clients on compliance, running a website that fails accessibility requirements, is a poor look before it is a legal problem — and in several markets it is now both. If the firm sells to EU consumers and sits above the micro-enterprise threshold, the European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025. If an agency is not raising WCAG conformance during the build, that is a signal about the build. Our write-up on a year of EAA enforcement covers who is actually caught, and who is not.

Our law firm builds start at $1,199 and run to $2,999 with booking integration, one-time, with the site transferring to the firm on final payment and no minimum term on anything afterwards. That is below the documented range, and the reason is not a secret: the work is remote, there is no account-manager layer, and the scope is a website rather than a website plus a marketing retainer. If your firm needs the retainer — ongoing legal SEO, content production, paid campaigns — a specialist legal marketing agency is genuinely the better fit and we will say so rather than stretch to cover it. What we will not do is quote the build low and recover it monthly.