Migrating Websites

Have you ever watched commercials from several decades ago? While their hokey jingles and dated color schemes might be entertaining, they certainly don’t convince you that something is reliably relevant. As it turns out, that’s just the same feeling potential clients get when they visited dated law firm websites. If that’s the impression your site creates, it might be time to migrate your firm’s website.
Here are some ways you may need to migrate your site
Hosting Platforms
Actually, migrating a website doesn’t necessarily mean moving its location. Sometimes migrating a website does involve moving it to a different hosting platform. It might also involve changing the domain name, for instance, if the name of your firm has changed. It could mean developing a mobile-friendly version or even just making lawyer websites more secure by transitioning the URL from HTTP to HTTPS.
Add Content
You might also need to add content to the site, for instance, if you cover new areas of law, or you want to add certain pages like one featuring testimonials. You might want to change the navigation of the site to make it easier for users to browse and get in touch with you. And, as mentioned, sometimes you really will just have to pick up the whole site and move it somewhere else. Oftentimes this involves re-platforming the site to a different host or site builder.
Redesign your Legal Website
Sometimes the platform on which your site was originally designed can’t facilitate a better look. Or perhaps you paid someone to design it, and have no idea where the site is actually located. Alternatively, your site may need certain features it didn’t need a few years ago, like a blog or a payment page or social media plugins that allow you to showcase happy clients. Thankfully, the solution to this problem may be as simple as migrating your law firm’s website to a different web host…although, as you might intuit, that migration is not a 1-2-3 process.
In order to have a smooth re-platforming, you will need to have an orderly content migration. Though this might seem like a simple (if not tedious) matter of cutting and pasting suited for an idle junior partner, there’s more to it.
New Law Firm Website Entirely
If you are changing domain names, for instance, you’ll want to make sure any links to your site on the web are updated. Thankfully, the team at Law Firm Sites can locate any and all backlinks to your site and reach out to those sites to make changes, or if they are directories, change the listing yourself. And no matter what type of migration you’re doing, you’ll want to keep your site visitors in the loop, perhaps with a simple message that your site is under construction.
Let us Help
The host of ancillary concerns like this are a good reason to have an experienced site builder—like the ones at Law Firm Sites—assist in the migration. Whether you’re moving the entire site to a different platform, developing a mobile version, merging duplicate pages, redoing your law firm website design, or adding or eliminating content, site migration is not something you should put off. Remember that your law firm website is the venue where clients get their first impression of your firm and develop an opinion of how you can help them.
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