If used properly, your law firm website can become a powerful marketing tool and a good way to bring in new clients. The problem is, many solo lawyers and small firms don’t have the time or know-how to set up and run a successful website. WordPress is a great option for these types of law firms. This post highlights 8 of the best WordPress plugins for law firm websites to help you optimize your site, get more visitors, and ultimately generate more client leads online.
WordPress Plugins Explained
First things first. What is WordPress and what is a “plugin?” WordPress is the most powerful blogging platform on the Internet, and it’s free to use to setup a blog or website for your law firm.
Out of the box, WordPress is pretty great for writing and publishing blogposts. But it lacks a number of other important features, especially if you are using WordPress for your law firm website. Things like sharing on social media, adding contact forms, and performing SEO optimization. Luckily, WordPress allows other developers to build these extra features as “plugins.”
So, a plugin is basically a little add-on to make your WordPress website better, or add a specific piece of functionality. There are literally thousands of plugins with all types of features, some that can even turn your WordPress site into a full blown e-commerce store.
But with all the plugins available, how do you know which ones to use? Well, to help you get started, we came up with this list of 8 of the best WordPress plugins for law firm websites.
8 WordPress Plugins for Law Firm Websites
If you want to take your WordPress website to the next level and make it a powerful marketing tool for your firm, there are features you will surely want to add. Your primary goals will be to get more traffic, increase interactions with visitors, improve your visibility in search engines, improve your credibility and trust with your audience, and above all get more clients!
These eight plugins each provide some key benefits to jumpstart your law firm’s WordPress website. Many of them are also among the top rated WordPress plugins overall. If you use WordPress for blogging, you should also check out this guide to blogging for law firms for more ideas on how to be a better blogger.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Why: SEO is really important for getting more visitors to your site, and WordPress SEO is the best search engine optimization plugin out there. Check out this post for some great SEO tips for law firms to find out more.
Functionality: WordPress SEO does things like help you optimize your content for keywords, generate a sitemap to help search engines navigate your site, optimize your URLs and links, and much more. Just about every good WordPress site has this plugin installed, and you should too.
Cost: FREE – although they also offer SEO audits and consulting for an additional cost
Disqus Comments
Why: While not as necessary on a law firm’s primary website, it’s a great feature to add to a law blog. A good blog engages readers and makes them feel like part of a community. A law blog in particular can benefit from this because your readers are likely to have legal questions and they want answers.
Functionality: The great thing about Disqus is that it reduces spam and requires people to post comments from a social media profile like Facebook or Twitter, so you’ll be more likely to get genuine comments from readers with questions (AKA your prospective clients), and less likely to get spam comments with links for Viagra discounts.
Cost: FREE
OptinMonster
Why: If you maintain a blog on your WordPress site, you would be wise to work on your email list. Building a strong email list is the number one key to online marketing. You should be collecting emails from your blog visitors and sending out monthly newsletters with updates from your law firm.
Functionality: OptinMonster offers a popup email collection box. Although they can be annoying at times, they also work really well, even increasing blog sign ups by as much as 600%. OptinMonster has a lot of customizable features and you can adjust the settings to make your popups less annoying.
Cost: $49-$349 depending on desired features
Shareaholic
Why: Sharing your articles on social media is an excellent way to get more visitors to your law firm website. It helps you engage with your target audience across all your social media channels, and it even boosts your SEO. The point is, you need to share and encourage sharing on all your content.
Functionality: Shareaholic allows you to put share links on all your posts and pages, and it makes it easy for you and your readers to share to almost any social network you can imagine. You can customize it to your liking, and it also includes a cool “related content” feature to encourage your readers to read more than just the page they landed on.
Cost: FREE
Google Analytics
Why: Knowledge is power! The best way to get more traffic and client inquiries from your blog is to gain insight into where your visitors are coming from and how they are interacting with your content, and then optimize from there. See this post for more info on Google Analytics.
Functionality: Google Analytics is one of the most powerful analytics tools on the internet. It allows you to track certain information about each visitor to your website. Things like where they came from (i.e. was it a search engine, Facebook, a link on another site, your email newsletter, etc.), what pages they viewed, what links they clicked, and more. With this data, you can start to optimize your website by creating more content that your readers love, and restructuring your pages and links to get more clicks and more people contacting you.
Cost: FREE
Booking Calendar
Why: Along with a contact form, another great way to encourage your website visitors to contact you is to have an easy way for them to book a consultation.
Functionality: Booking Calendar is a super simple, yet powerful. It has a ton of useful features to help you book consultations with your prospective clients. You can accept of decline each request and they even allow payment processing along with it for the premium plans.
Cost: FREE – $999 (the more expensive offerings are for multi-user functionality and a boatload of added features that may not be necessary for a small firm)
WP Customer Reviews
Why: Customer reviews are an excellent way to establish your credibility to your website visitors. Plus, more and more people are looking for lawyer reviews online before making a hiring decision.
Functionality: WP Customer Reviews makes it easy to collect reviews from your clients and display them on your law firm website. It also allows you to moderate incoming reviews so you can filter out any that you don’t like.
Cost: FREE
So there you have it…the 8 best WordPress plugins for law firm websites. But surely there are other awesome plugins out there. What other WordPress plugins have you found useful for your law firm? Add them in the comments below!
We published this blog post in October 2014. Last updated: .
Categorized in: Marketing
