Security left unwatched
Out-of-date software is how most law firm sites get hacked, and a hacked site gets blacklisted by Google before you even find out.
A law firm website isn't a one-time project — it's an asset that needs upkeep, the same way an office lease or a malpractice policy does. Left alone, software falls out of date, plugins conflict, forms quietly stop sending, and nobody notices until a prospective client tries to reach you and can't.
Most firms find out their maintenance was inadequate at the worst possible moment — after a hack, after months of a broken intake form nobody was watching, or after a redesign because the old site had rotted past the point of trusting it. All three are maintenance failures, and all three are avoidable with the same unglamorous monthly work.
// What happens without it
Four ways an unmaintained site quietly costs you clients.
None of these show up as a dramatic outage. They show up as a slow decline in consultations that's hard to trace back to a cause — which is exactly what makes them dangerous.
Forms that quietly fail
A plugin conflict breaks the contact form silently. Every visitor who tried to reach you since is a lead you never knew existed.
Speed that decays over time
Every plugin and update adds weight. A site that launched fast can be measurably slower a year later with nobody having touched it.
No one watching uptime
Hosting goes down more often than firms assume. Without monitoring, the first person to notice is a client who gave up and called someone else.
// Why "keeping the lights on" isn't enough
Maintenance that only reacts is barely maintenance.
A freelancer who fixes things when you email them is reactive maintenance — useful the day something breaks, useless every day before that. Security scanning, monitoring and tested backups have to run whether or not anyone remembered to ask.
And a generalist maintaining a law firm site the same way as a restaurant site misses what's actually at stake: an intake form going down doesn't lose a dinner reservation, it loses a case, and a bar-regulated site has compliance exposure a generic maintenance checklist was never built to catch.
// Plans
The core coverage is the same. Support hours are what scale.
Security, monitoring and backups run identically on every plan — none of that is something to skimp on. What changes is how much hands-on support and development time is included each month.
| Growth | Accelerate | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Support & development hours / mo | 1 | 4 | 100 |
| Monthly software & plugin updates | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Premium plugin licenses included | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Post-update testing before it goes live | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Security scanning | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 24/7 uptime monitoring | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Secure, tested backups | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Post-hack cleanup support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hosting included | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Email support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Content delivery network | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| E-commerce support | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Staging environment for changes | — | — | ✓ |
| Weekly performance & strategy call | — | — | ✓ |
| Starts at | CAD $300/mo | CAD $500/mo | CAD $3,000/mo |
Enterprise's jump reflects a hundred hours of support and development time rather than one or four — it's built for firms actively managing their site as a growth asset, not just keeping it online. We'll help you pick the right one on the discovery call.
// The process
Nothing gets watched until we know what we're watching.
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01
Onboarding audit
Every plugin, integration and outstanding update catalogued before anything changes, so nothing gets missed in the handoff.
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02
Security hardening & backups
Vulnerabilities from the audit closed first, then a tested backup schedule set up — a backup that's never been restored isn't a backup yet.
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03
Monitoring & alerting
Uptime, forms and Core Web Vitals watched continuously, so an issue gets caught by us before a client experiences it.
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04
Monthly updates
Software and plugins updated on a schedule, tested before they go live — not pushed live and hoped for.
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05
Ongoing support
Content edits, a new attorney bio, a practice area addition — handled inside your plan's support hours rather than a fresh invoice each time.
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06
Reporting
A monthly summary of what was updated, what was caught, and what's coming up — so maintenance is visible, not just assumed.
// The math, not just the peace of mind
A monthly plan is cheap, relative to what neglect actually costs.
Maintenance is easy to treat as overhead to cut — right up until the thing it was preventing happens anyway.
A hack costs more than years of Growth
Cleaning up a compromised site, or rebuilding one that never recovers its search visibility, routinely costs more than the CAD $7,000 a Foundation-tier rebuild starts at — against a Growth maintenance plan at $300 a month, that's still years of coverage for less than one incident.
Downtime you don't see is downtime you can't fix
A site that's down for an afternoon with nobody watching loses every visitor who arrived during it, permanently — they called someone else. Uptime monitoring turns an invisible loss into an alert someone actually acts on.
// Who trusts us with it
Sites we built, that we're still looking after.
Lamber Goodnow Injury Lawyers, an eighteen-case-type, thirteen-city Arizona practice, is a website design and ongoing maintenance client — the same firm that built the site keeps it updated, monitored and backed up, month over month. That continuity is the point: nobody has to hand a hardened, well-documented site to a stranger and hope nothing gets missed in the handoff.
// What we find in audits
The mistakes that turn into a 2am phone call.
After enough onboarding audits the same handful of gaps repeat, almost always from a site nobody was actively watching.
Updates skipped for months
Outdated software is the single most common way a law firm site gets compromised — see WordPress security for law firms.
A backup that's never been tested
A backup nobody has restored isn't a backup, it's a hope. What every firm needs in place covers what "tested" actually means.
No one watching for downtime
Without uptime monitoring, the firm is always the last to know the site went down — usually from a client, not a system.
Content edits piling up in an inbox
A new attorney, a closed practice area, a changed phone number — sitting in an email thread for months because there's no standing plan to action it.
Waiting for a hack to think about security
5 signs your site has been hacked — most firms don't recognize the early ones, because nobody was looking for them.
DIY maintenance with no real schedule
"We'll get to it" is not a maintenance plan. See how often a law firm website should actually be updated.
Weighing whether to handle this in-house or hand it off? In-house vs. outsourced law firm site maintenance →
// Ready when you are
Find out what your current site is exposed to.
We'll check your site for security, speed, and uptime issues and tell you exactly what needs attention. No obligation.
Get a Free Website Audit// Questions
Frequently asked
How often does my website actually need maintenance?
Security and software updates should happen monthly at minimum, and uptime and backups are continuous, not scheduled. Content updates depend on how often your firm adds attorneys, practice areas, or announcements — see how often a law firm website should be updated.
What happens if my site goes down?
Every plan includes 24/7 uptime monitoring, so we're typically aware of and resolving downtime before you notice it yourself. What that monitoring actually watches for is covered in our guide to uptime monitoring.
What's the difference between the three plans?
Support and development hours, mainly — Growth includes one hour a month, Accelerate four, and Enterprise a hundred. The core security, backup and monitoring work is identical at every tier; what scales is how much ongoing change and hands-on support the plan can absorb.
What does law firm website maintenance cost?
Plans start at CAD $300 a month for Growth, CAD $500 for Accelerate, and CAD $3,000 for Enterprise. Enterprise's jump reflects a hundred hours of support and development time a month rather than one or four — it's built for firms treating their site as an actively managed asset, not just keeping the lights on.
Do you support WordPress, or other platforms too?
WordPress is what most of the sites we maintain run on, and it's what our plans are built around — plugin updates, premium plugin licensing, staging environments. If your site runs on something else, tell us on the discovery call and we'll confirm what maintenance actually looks like on it.
What if our site has already been hacked?
Post-hack cleanup support is included at every tier. See 5 signs your law firm website has been hacked if you're not sure yet — the earlier it's caught, the less there is to clean up.
Can maintenance be combined with SEO or a redesign?
Yes, and for firms running both it usually should be — a site that ranks well and then breaks or slows down loses the ranking it earned. See our law firm SEO and website design services for how they connect to maintenance.
Who owns the site and hosting?
You do, outright — the domain, the hosting account and the files. Maintenance is an ongoing service on top of something you already own, not a way of holding it hostage.
