How long does it take to update a legal website?

A partner joins your firm on Monday. The announcement is approved and people are already searching her name. When does her profile go live?

In some firms the answer is Monday morning. In others it's a support ticket and a two-week wait. That delay usually comes from a platform picked for reasons that had little to do with publishing.

This report sets out the published evidence on how law firm websites are managed and what a slow one costs. It ends with five numbers you can collect in your own firm this month.

Your clients read your website more often than your firm thinks

In 2024 Passle surveyed managing partners and chief marketers at 200 leading law firms across the UK and North America. 73% believed their clients didn't visit the firm's website often. A separate survey of general counsel found the opposite. 52% said their law firm's website is their main source of information and they visit at least once a week. A further 34% visit at least once a month. The figures were reported by Solicitors Journal.

Connor Kinnear is Passle's chief marketing officer. He says clients want their firms to keep them up to date. "The obvious platform for this is a law firm's website."

The 2026 research points the same way. JD Supra and LIMELIGHT surveyed nearly 200 corporate counsel and senior executives. 61% said a law firm's published thinking had directly influenced a decision to hire outside counsel. 82% read it at least once a week.

The people who instruct you are probably on your site every week or so, and they'll notice if a page is out of date.

AI search tools use your website as a source

In the same survey, 69% said they use AI answers as a starting point for deeper research. Nearly half click through to the sources. Living Group's 2026 ratings of 100 leading law firm websites now list AI-ready content structure among their criteria.

An AI tool describes your firm from what your site says today. If a departed partner still has a live profile, an AI answer can still recommend him. Find out more.

Why website changes take so long

This report uses one measure throughout. Request to live is the time between someone asking for a website change and that change being public. Most of that time is spent waiting, either in a queue for someone to make the change or for sign-off.

Take the new partner profile from the start of this report. In a firm where an agency runs the website, it tends to go through these steps:

1. HR confirms the start date and sends over the partner's details.
2. Marketing writes the profile and arranges a photo.
3. The partner checks the draft.
4. Compliance or the head of the practice approves it.
5. Marketing raises a ticket with the agency.
6. The agency schedules the work and builds the page.
7. Marketing checks the page on a test site and asks for corrections.
8. The agency publishes it.

Five of those eight steps depend on someone outside the marketing team. Each step is a small job, but the profile can wait a day or two at every handover, and that's how a short task ends up taking two weeks.

Waiting for someone to make the change

Webflow's 2026 State of the Website report surveyed 1,000 marketing and technology leaders in the UK and North America with the research firm Vanson Bourne. It covers every sector and Webflow sells a website platform. Read it with that in mind. Its findings are still relevant to law firms.

93% of marketing leaders rely at least partly on developers or agencies outside their own department to run the site. 92% of organisations say requests for website updates are growing in size and complexity. In the 2024 edition, about a third of respondents said a simple copy edit took two weeks or more.

The same survey asked who is in charge of the website. 97% of marketing leaders said their team owns the website strategy, and so did 94% of technical leaders. 91% of technical leaders also reported some friction between technical and non-technical teams when the site needs changing.

It also asked whether web projects are delivered on time, and 46% of organisations said they struggle to do that. The figure was 60% for custom-built sites and 41% for the large enterprise suites that companies such as Optimizely and Sitecore sell. Traditional and headless content management systems came in between.

On many enterprise platforms a new page layout is a developer's job. If your developers sit in an agency, each new layout also needs a quote and has to wait for a slot in their schedule.

Waiting for approval

Law firms have good reason to check what they publish. A wrong statement about the law or a fee is a regulatory problem. In 2022 the agency Shape Works reviewed the websites of the UK's 100 largest firms. Its researchers observed that worry about reputation had led firms to treat anything they published as a liability.

Approval has to happen, but in many firms it happens by email and that's slow. A draft goes to a partner, then to compliance, and comes back as an attachment. After a couple of rounds it's hard to tell which version is final.

The regulator's own website is a useful example. When the Solicitors Regulation Authority rebuilt its site on Optimizely, its old content sat in code and in a separate tool that staff couldn't reach quickly. The new system has workflow built in. Optimizely's case study says change control and content approval now happen inside the content management system. So it's possible to publish quickly and still have every change approved.

It also helps to decide in advance which changes need which level of approval. If everything goes down the same route, a corrected phone number waits for the same partner as a comment piece on a new judgment. Here's one way to split it:

• Typos and broken links: marketing publishes without further approval.
• Profiles, contact details, event pages and news: the person concerned confirms the facts and marketing publishes.
• Fees and service information covered by the Transparency Rules: compliance approves.
• Legal commentary and client alerts: the partner who wrote it approves, and compliance does too if your firm requires it.

Write the split down and ask your compliance officer to agree it. Once that's done, routine changes no longer need a partner's time.

The cost of slow website updates

The most obvious cost is timing. A client alert is only useful while the news is fresh. If a competitor publishes on the day of the judgment and you publish a week later, your clients will probably have read theirs already.

Recruitment is affected as well. In its 2022 review, Shape Works said the websites of the largest firms had become a fundamental part of how they recruit. A candidate who looks up the team they'd be joining may find people listed who left months ago. The other costs are less noticeable, and they fall into two groups.

Compliance information that goes out of date

The SRA Transparency Rules have applied since December 2018. Every regulated firm with a website must publish its complaints procedure and display the SRA's clickable logo. Firms that offer certain common services, including residential conveyancing and probate, must also publish price and service information.

The SRA checks firm websites against these rules. Between May 2023 and September 2024 it issued 439 official warnings and 36 fixed penalty fines for breaches. Its checks led to changes on more than 500 websites. A fixed penalty is £750 and a repeat breach costs £1,500. The SRA publishes each one. In the regulator's 2023 evaluation, only 42% of firms said they published everything the rules require.

Firms that believe they comply are sometimes wrong. The SRA spot-checked firms that had declared themselves compliant and found that most weren't meeting every requirement. In some cases the clickable logo hadn't been set up properly, and its link to the SRA's record of the firm didn't work. A broken logo link is a maintenance fault, the same kind as a broken link anywhere else on the site.

Paul Philip was the SRA's chief executive when it updated its guidance in 2024. "Transparency is a key aspect of trust in legal services," he said.

The SRA's proposed business plan for 2026/27 pauses further work on extending the rules. The rules already in force are unchanged.

These are the items worth checking on your own site. The list draws on the SRA's guidance and on a Law Society article by Andy Donovan about the faults the regulator picks up most often.

• The SRA's clickable logo is in a prominent place and its link works.
• The complaints page explains how to complain to the firm, the Legal Ombudsman and the SRA.
• The Legal Ombudsman's time limits and postal address are the current ones.
• Prices state the amount of VAT or the percentage, because "plus VAT" on its own doesn't meet the rule.
• Each priced service lists the likely disbursements, the key stages, typical timescales and anything the price leaves out.
• Each priced service names the people who do the work, with their experience and qualifications.
• Any practice area you've added recently has been checked against the list of services the rules cover.

This matters for how your site is managed. Fees change and fee earners leave, and every one of those changes means editing the website. If an edit takes two weeks, your site is out of date for two weeks. Your firm may already have signed a declaration saying it complies.

Maintenance that doesn't get done

The Shape Works review found an average of 225 broken links per site across the UK top 100. Only 13% of sites had none. One site in 100 was rated excellent for mobile speed. That data is from 2022. We found no newer public benchmark of the UK top 100.

Globally, things are getting better. Living Group rates the websites of 100 leading global law firms each year. In 2025 it placed 62 of them in its lowest category. In 2026 that number fell to 47. Only 8 reached the top category.

Fixing a broken link only takes a couple of minutes. If every fix needs a support ticket, though, they tend not to get done.

Free audit here.

How to measure your request to live time

If you want budget for a better platform, it helps to have figures. You can collect yours in about a week.

Five numbers to collect

Find the last time each of these happened. Count the working days from request to live.

1. A fee or a job title corrected on an existing page.
2. A new partner profile.
3. A client alert. Count from approved draft to published page.
4. A new landing page for an event or campaign.
5. The removal of a leaver's profile.

For each one, note how many people handled it and how many of them work outside your firm.

You won't need new software for this. The dates are already in your email and your agency's ticket system, and most content management systems keep a history for each page. Agency invoices are worth pulling as well, because they show what each change cost. For each change, record the date of the request, the date of final approval and the date it went live.

Separate approval time from publishing time

Split each number at the point of final approval. Anything before that point is down to your internal process. Anything after it is down to the platform and whoever runs it.

The second half is the part a platform can fix. As a working target, an approved text correction or profile should be live the same day. An approved alert should be live within the hour. A new page built from existing components should take a day or two. If your numbers run to weeks, the platform is what's slowing you down.

[PLACEHOLDER: benchmark table from the interviews, showing the median and range for each of the five numbers by firm size.]

Once you have the numbers, take them to whoever holds the budget. In the Passle survey, 76% of managing partners and marketing chiefs said the value of marketing isn't fully understood across their firm. A general complaint that the website is slow won't get far with that audience. These figures are more likely to get a hearing:

• How many days your last client alert waited after it was approved.
• What the firm paid its agency last year for routine content changes.
• How long the last leaver stayed on the site after their final day.
• How many items on the SRA checklist above were out of date when you looked.

Send us your five numbers and we'll show you where they sit against the firms we've interviewed.

What to look for in a platform

A law firm can't give up control to gain speed. You need a platform that's quick to publish on and has sign-off built in. These questions apply whichever platform or agency you use.

Control covers design as well as approval. Shape Works warned that when internal editors lack experience or work with poorly governed controls, the original design gets muddled. A good platform prevents that by giving editors a fixed set of approved page components to build with, and by limiting who can change the design itself.

Six questions to ask your platform provider or agency

1. Can a marketer build a new page from approved components without a developer? If the answer is no, every campaign page and event page becomes a development job.
2. Does approval happen inside the platform, with a record of who approved what? You'll want that record if the SRA or a client ever asks how a statement came to be published.
3. Can you see who changed what, and when? This is how you find out why a fee or a profile is wrong.
4. Can two people work on separate pages at once without publishing each other's drafts? On some platforms, publishing one change sends every unfinished change live with it.
5. Can you restore an earlier version in minutes? Mistakes will happen, and fixing one shouldn't need a support ticket.
6. Who hosts and patches the site, and what uptime is in the contract? Security updates on a self-hosted site are a job somebody has to own.

If the answer to the first two is no, your request to live time is unlikely to improve.

Before you commit to a move, ask how the new platform will connect to your other systems. A large firm's website usually takes data from the CRM and from the HR system that holds people's details, and each connection has to be rebuilt. Ask about the archive as well. Years of insights and news need to move across with their web addresses redirected, or the firm loses the search traffic those pages bring in.

A new platform won't fix everything. If sign-off still happens by email after the move, the approval half of your request to live time will stay the same.

Other platforms can meet these requirements too. Freeths moved its site from WordPress to Umbraco, and IDHL, the agency that built it, says the firm's team can now update the site quickly and easily.

Where Webflow fits

We build on Webflow. Keep that in mind as you read this section.

Webflow is a visual website platform. Marketers build and publish pages themselves on a structured content management system with managed hosting. Its Team plan adds publishing workflows, branch staging, a site activity log and page branching. Page branching lets several people work on separate pages at once. Its Enterprise plan carries a 99.99% uptime commitment. Together these answer most of the six questions.

Here's what that means for a law firm site. Each type of page, such as a profile or an insight article, is set up once as a template. Adding a partner then means filling in a form with her details, and the page is built from the template when you publish.

LegalShield, a US legal services provider, moved to Webflow. It reports that its content team now publishes in three languages without waiting for engineers.

Webflow does have limits. It's a website platform only and doesn't include a customer data platform or a digital asset manager. Its Premium plan caps a site at 20,000 CMS items. Count your insights archive before you commit. Each site is priced separately. A firm with ten regional sites buys ten plans. If your firm runs personalisation across email and web from one suite, that suite may still be the better choice.

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