In this episode of The Verdict is Marketing, Todd Blackman, co-founder of LawBARD, offers a comprehensive playbook for Florida law firms to ensure their websites are secure, performant, and 100% compliant with Bar rules while effectively serving as a marketing engine with South Florida Web Studio founder Steven Alig.
Podcast Resources:
- Website ADA Compliance – accessiBe
- WCAG & ADA Compliance
- 10-Point Hosting Checklist
- NAP
- Learn more about South Florida Web Studio Founder Steven Alig
Show Transcript
Kim Sailer: Welcome back to The Verdict is Marketing the podcast for all things law firm marketing. I’m your host Kim Sailer, and today I’m joined by my co-founder Todd Blackman, and owner and operator of South Florida Web Studio Steven Alig. We’re diving into a topic. Every law firm should care about how to make sure your website is secure, ethical, and 100% compliant with bar rules while still performing like a marketing machine.
Todd Blackmon: Thanks Kim. Here’s a crazy stat that got my attention recently. 42% of large US law firms were hit by a data breach last year. Some paid out multimillion dollar settlements. It’s no small risk. So today we’re gonna break down what law firms can do to stay ahead and stay compliant.
Steven Alig of So Fla Web Studio
Todd Blackmon: I want to introduce Steven Alig. He’s been building secure legal websites since the days of Dreamweaver. He now leads a team focused on privacy first, hosting and client first design for law firms across the country. Steven.
Steven Alig: Thanks Todd. It’s great to be here. We work with lots of different types of business many in the legal industry, from small solo practitioners to large multi-office law firms, even some bar associations. We make sure their websites are fast, secure, bar compliant and don’t look like government forms.
Website Security and Hosting Checklist
Todd Blackmon: Yeah, I see that a lot. What really keeps you up at night when you look at legal websites?
Steven Alig: Unpatched plugins and poor backup routines, cheap shared hosting. These are some of the things that I see too much of where people are not providing the proper security on their websites that they need to have. It’s like driving without insurance. If you’re running WordPress, which many law firms are, security should be a number one priority.
Steven Alig: And a couple things to consider with security are:
- A virtual private server (VPS) at a minimum. Shared hosting virtual private servers and dedicated servers. You’re serious about your practice. You want to make sure that you present that image online as well.
- Having a valid SSL certificate is a given in today’s time. You need to make sure that all of your data is encrypted as it’s transmits across the internet, and an SSL certificate will do that for your website.
- Making sure you have a system in place for updating your plugins. There are platforms that will auto update them for you. That’s a great solution, as long as they’re done properly, or just make sure that as securities issues are released, you’re getting them updated right away, usually within a 24 hour timeframe.
Todd Blackmon: That’s a real important one.
Steven Alig:
- The idea of backups is extremely important, and if you’ve never had an issue, a lot of times you don’t understand or don’t realize the importance of that. But as soon as you have one issue with a backup where you need to restore something, it’s a godsend to have it. And you can find website hosting providers that will do automatic nightly backups. We recommend that at a minimum. And even doing an offsite. So that it’s stored somewhere else and you have a copy of all of your data.
- And lastly an incident response plan. What is it that you’re going to do when there is a data breach or a security issue that happens? Have you documented a process? Hopefully you’ll never have to use it, but if you do, it’s great to know you have a guidebook that you can utilize to implement.
Todd Blackmon: Excellent, excellent. Yeah, so we’re gonna have a 10 point hosting checklist on the LawBARD website. I’ll definitely link to those in the show notes.
Website Performance and User Experience
Todd Blackmon: Let’s talk about what makes a site not just safe, but actually effective.
Steven Alig: This comes down to performance and user experience.
- Speed is a huge factor. If your secure site is slow, your conversions will die. Make sure your site is as fast as possible, and using something like Google’s page speed insights will provide you with a score that you can get into that 90% percentile range. Using newer image formats is huge. There’s some formats like web P that are relatively new. They load much faster, much smaller file size, and the image compression looks fantastic. Using lazy loading where assets are loaded before they appear on the screen is another factor that you can implement. And avoiding bloated themes with features that you don’t need. WordPress has a lot of themes that you can purchase that look great on the outside, but they come with so many bells and whistles that they just add layers of code and it just slows everything down.
Todd Blackmon: Oh yeah, for sure. I’ve seen that numerous times, especially taking over a website that another developer had created or they task a staff member to upload some photos of the staff or the business, and they don’t know enough to compress those images. That’s a common mistake.
Steven Alig: Yeah.
- Themes. The interesting part about themes is that they are made for the theme developer to sell the theme. So they put as many bells and whistles into them as possible without actually thinking about the the usability of it, or even the performance of it. They want to sell the theme, not necessarily implement a great website.
- Clear navigation matters too. Visitors should know what to do within the first few seconds of visiting your website. That means a strong call to action. Short contact forms, maybe even a live chat. Make sure your call to action is linked to a contact us button or something that links to a form. Make sure that’s above the fold or maybe in the navigation at the top. Always present and available. Make sure your phone number’s visible. These are basic things that need to be on every website. Know what your conversion is and make sure that it’s readily available for all the users.
Todd Blackmon: Excellent, excellent. Yeah. And not to forget about being mobile friendly. You needs to work on mobile. It’s now the majority, 60% of the traffic is now coming from your phone.
Steven Alig: Of course. Yeah. That goes without saying a responsive site that adapts to your screen size is key. And in 2025, that’s all we’re building.
Website SEO, Compliance, and Strategy
Todd Blackmon: Okay. Anything else when it comes to like SEO and compliance?
Steven Alig: Yeah, there’s a few other things.
- You need to know what’s going on your website and analytics tool will tell you about your visitors and who’s coming to your site and what they’re doing on your site, where they’re coming from. Google Analytics was the major player. They still are. And they recently switched over to G4, which is their fourth iteration of analytics, and there was a lot of changes that came with that. Making it a lot more complex than it was in the past. There’s some newer tools now, things like plausible that are out there that are really with a privacy first approach. And and a more simplistic reports for the for the less data centered firm that’s out there. A lot of smaller firms want to know who’s visiting or where they’re coming from, how what pages are popular the basic stats. And, you don’t need these massive tools with long sales funnels and lots of complex data. It’s great if you have the time and resources to go through that, but if you just want to know what, what’s happening on your site, some of these other tools like plausible are much more user friendly.
- Also keeping your name, address, and phone (NAP) consistent everywhere across all platforms. So if you’re listed in different directories and social sites and other marketing materials, make sure that your address and your phone numbers are in the same format and consistent. You can also add,
Todd Blackmon: I see that in Google. My place is a lot AVEs recently for sites.
Steven Alig: Yeah, and it could be something as simple as just, are you including North or the letter N in your address, right? Which format are you using? And try to stay consistent with that. If you’re using a suite number, make sure that suite number is listed a across every directory.
Steven Alig: Those are just some examples.
- Adding schema to markup to help search engines understand your site is important. Google has a lot of information about how to properly do that so that in the code the search engines can very easily read your location data.
- And write with the client first tone. This is important with law firms, less legalese and more plain English.
Website Accessibility
Todd Blackmon: Yeah, that makes sense for sure. Okay let’s not forget about accessibility. It’s not just ethical. I mean it helps you reach more people, avoid lawsuits. We have some fantastic accessibility resources at lawBARD.com and I will also link those in the show notes.
Steven Alig: Excellent.
Websites – Looking Ahead to 2026
Todd Blackmon: As we head into 2026, what do you see? What’s next?
Steven Alig: AI isn’t slowing down. We haven’t talked much about it in this podcast as of yet, but it’s definitely top of mind for everyone right now. And since it’s not slowing down, neither of your clients, law firms need to start stress testing their user experience, like they test their intake forms. Basically build trust, remove friction, and stay fast. That’s the playbook.
Todd Blackmon: Yeah. Excellent. This was all great information, valuable information I think a lot of the law firms would benefit on this. So for anyone listening, just check the show notes for the checklist and links and if you’re not sure whether your site is secure or compliant, reach out. We’re happy to help. Thanks again, Steve. Go ahead, take it away Kim……
Kim Sailer: if you would like a full transcript of today’s episode, please visit us at lawbard.com/verdict. You can also reach me at Kim@lawbard.com or visit us anytime at lawbard.com. Thanks again for listening, and until next time, The Verdict is Marketing is adjourned.
