Can You Log Into Your Law Firm’s Website Tonight?

Quarter to eleven on a Tuesday night, and a man is standing in his own kitchen with the light switched off.

The light is off because the dark is the only privacy in that house tonight. His phone is in his hand, and he has typed the word lawyer and the name of his town into it, which he has never once done before.

He taps the second result. The firm looks right, the photograph of the building looks like somewhere he could park, and the telephone number sits at the top of the page in big friendly type.

He rings it at nine the following morning and it goes nowhere, because the office changed numbers in April and the website still says otherwise.

So he goes back to the results, taps the next name down, and books an appointment with the firm that answered on the fourth ring.

When did you last ring your own office from a phone that isn’t yours?

Nobody in that first office did anything wrong on purpose. The number is still wrong tonight because correcting it means emailing a guy, and the guy takes a week.

I’ve been the guy. I’ve also been the reason a number sat wrong on a client’s homepage for eleven days one August, which is how I ended up caring about any of this.

Five minutes, starting now

Do this while you read. You need a laptop, and you don’t need to care very much how it turns out. I run it on every sales call I take, and it costs me less time than the small talk does.

1. Open your own website. Not from a bookmark, type the address in like a stranger would.

2. Put /wp-admin on the end of it and press enter.

3. Look at what comes back at you.

If a login box appears, you’re on WordPress, and you’re standing in the biggest crowd in your profession. When I lined the trades up by platform, law firms came back leaning on it harder than the country does: 55.7% of the firm websites I audited run WordPress, where the figure across small business sites in general is 36.4%.

Did a box come back at you, or did the page just shrug?

If you get a page saying nothing is there, try /admin instead. Squarespace and Wix both leave their names in the code where I can find them, and both turn up in this trade, though nowhere near as often as the first one.

And if none of that gets you anywhere, scroll to the very bottom of your homepage and read the smallest line of text on it. I’ve found the answer down there more often than I’ve found it anywhere clever.

What that box is actually for

The dashboard sitting behind that login is a content management system, which is software with one honest purpose: letting a person who isn’t a programmer change a sentence on a page without asking anyone.

When did your own details last change, and who did you have to ask?

The day it earns its keep is the Tuesday your number changes. Or the Friday the office starts closing at noon. Or the morning a partner leaves and her name is still on the front page in gold.

Miss that Tuesday and the man in the dark kitchen rings a number that goes nowhere, and you’ll never hear a word about it, because he isn’t going to write and tell you what happened.

Three things to look at once you’re in

Assume the box let you through. If it didn’t, hold that thought, because it’s the most useful result of the evening.

1. The top of the screen, where it counts how many things are waiting to be updated. A big number there means nobody has opened this in a long while, and my own site has embarrassed me on that one twice.

2. The list of users, and read every name on it. The web company from 2017 is quite possibly still in there holding a full set of keys to your building, and I still have keys to buildings I stopped working on years ago.

3. Change something tiny and save it. The phone number in the footer will do. Put it back afterwards if you like, because the point was never the number.

Three yeses and you own your website. Two and you’re renting it from someone who hasn’t told you the rent.

Which number did you land on?

While you’re in there, look for the plugins list. A plugin is a bolt-on that adds something WordPress didn’t arrive with, and the paid ones are the ones I’ve watched go quiet, which is how a contact form stops emailing anybody and you find out five weeks later from a client who assumed you were ignoring her.

If the login box never appeared

Then you have a different evening ahead of you, and I’d much rather you had it now than in the middle of a week when something is broken.

Someone has that box. It might be the firm that built the site in 2017, a nephew, a marketing company you stopped paying two years ago, or a hosting account attached to the email address of a receptionist who left.

Find out which. One email, sent tomorrow, asking for the login to the website and the login to wherever your domain name is registered.

If nobody can tell you where the site is even hosted, start with whoever gets the bill, and read what a host is supposed to be giving you before you agree to move anything anywhere.

Most of the law firm sites I take over arrive without anyone knowing where those two things live, and the first week of the job is a treasure hunt through nine year old email.

What would happen at your place if the person who built it stopped answering? Every owner I ask tells me they would work it out, and I’ve sat with a few of them while they found out otherwise.

But WordPress is slow, isn’t it?

Someone has told you that, and there’s a decent chance they told you while quoting you for a rebuild. Did they show you anything when they said it?

Flower shops get the same phone call, and the rebuild waiting at the end of it is one I turn down in favor of three cheaper jobs.

The firms I checked don’t back that up. These sites arrive on a phone at 64 out of 100 when I score them, better than the 58 I get across everything I run that test on, and both of those numbers come from exactly the same firms.

You shouldn’t take my word for any of that, which is the other reason I like this check, because the explorer at the foot of my report rolls up a whole trade the second you choose lawyers and leave the city box alone, platform shares and sample sizes printed underneath one another. I go back to it whenever a column looks too convenient, and it has caught me out twice this year.

I stopped blaming the platform years ago, partly because I’ve built on it for most of my working life.

Before that I did the opposite. Seeing WordPress on a plumber’s site used to make me skip ahead in my head before I had opened a single page of it.

The platform is rarely the problem. The problem is that a page can be perfect on the day it launches and wrong by the following spring, and only one person in this story can fix that quickly.

What changes if you do it

Nothing about your website will look any different tomorrow morning. No visitor will notice a thing, and that’s sort of the point.

What changes is the next time the number moves, or a partner leaves, or the office shuts at noon on the Friday of a long weekend. It’s a four minute job you do yourself between meetings, instead of an email you keep meaning to send.

And the man standing in a dark kitchen at quarter to eleven rings a number that rings.

Worth five minutes tonight? I’d honestly rather you did this yourself than paid me to tell you about it. Send me your address if you want a second opinion on whatever you find in there, and I’ll tell you what the outside of it looks like from here, for nothing.