Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. You probably know or have heard that WordPress powers like 40% of the internet, but we need to dig into whether or not it's really the right fit for your law firm. Today we're diving into the pros and cons of WordPress and we're going to talk a little bit about the behind-the-scenes WordPress drama that, if you're not really plugged into the community, you may not know about. So first let's dive straight in. Let's talk about the great parts of using WordPress for law firms.

Speaker 1: 0:37

When it comes to building a website for your law firm, wordpress stands out because it's one of the top platforms. But why is it such a popular choice and why should you consider it? Let's jump straight into the benefits. First is flexibility and customization. One of WordPress's biggest strengths is its unparalleled flexibility. I would say that there are probably some other options that are maybe a little bit more flexible, but WordPress can really work like a blank canvas that you can design almost exactly how you want if you want to. There are thousands and thousands of themes and plugins, so you're not just stuck with a couple of options, like you may be on other providers. I'm not going to name them here, but you know what their names are. You can create something from scratch by completely custom coding a theme, or you can buy something off the shelf and make it really personal so that it actually reflects who your firm is and your personality and your brandings. And this customization can go a little bit further than just how it looks. If you need appointment scheduling so that clients can book consultations directly, there's a plugin for that. Need a secure portal for document uploads, there's a plugin for that. Whether it's adding practice pages that are specific to different types of law, or adding team pages that have the same layout across dozens or hundreds of different team members, even integrating chatbots to handle new queries, or any of these things, WordPress makes it really easy to add functionality as your firm evolves, and it gives you the options to customize it so that it's exactly what you want it to be. When I say customize, keep that in mind, because, while that is a huge benefit of WordPress, we're going to come back to that Now. The other big benefit and this is again something that is paralleled on a lot of other platforms, but WordPress gives us a little bit more flexibility here Once again, that's the SEO options If you want your potential clients to find you online, you're going to need a website that works well with the search engines and that gives you the options you need to improve.

Speaker 1: 2:41

Wordpress is great for this because it has a bunch of built-in SEO capabilities and it's compatible with tons of powerful plugins like RankMath or very powerful, but not my favorite Yoast SEO. There are a lot of really good options for SEO plugins. I personally really like RankMath, but these tools can guide you in optimizing every aspect of your site, from the meta descriptions to the keyword usage to internal linking. All of these things make it much easier for Google to understand and rank your pages, and this is important because you know that's the whole point of SEO. And when local SEO comes into play which we've talked about a lot and we know it's really crucial for law firms, wordpress makes it really easy to optimize for local searches by enabling Google Maps integrations and adding structured data for location-specific services and building in all the different types of location-based content that you're going to need to rank well locally. And by leveraging these tools, it makes it way easier for your firm to climb the rankings and stand out, especially if the market is particularly competitive.

Speaker 1: 3:46

And that leads us to our next point, which is scalability. If it's competitive and if you're scaling into new markets whether you're a solo who wants to do multiple markets or a large firm with lots of offices and attorneys WordPress can grow with you. So if you're starting small, that's absolutely fine. You can build a straightforward website and then start to add on and expand functionality over time. As your firm grows. You can add new features, create additional pages, and WordPress hosts are usually pretty good at scaling to handle increased traffic without having to switch platforms. So if you're a firm that's going to start with a single page site but might later want to blog or you might want to, you know have a portal for your potential clients or for your existing clients, with WordPress these additions can happen all in the background until they're ready to go, making the transition seamless and allowing your website to evolve alongside your business.

Speaker 1: 4:39

But let's talk about cost, because WordPress is open source, meaning the core software is free. Cost, because WordPress is open source, meaning the core software is free, and that might sound like a really good idea, but there are definitely some numbers here. It can reduce some of your upfront expenses, especially when you're comparing this to proprietary website billers that you know, you have to start building, and it takes three months to build it and you're paying a monthly fee for that. Even with the premium themes and plugins, the cost of WordPress is usually still lower than building a completely custom website from scratch, too. We have a framework that we're working with. Usually, we can work with a theme to make things a little bit easier, and even if you're going completely from scratch, you're able to use WordPress's system to create your own theme so that you can quickly scale up with new pages. So in any development scenario, you're minimizing the actual amount of coding that needs to be done. Plus, wordpress is really really popular, and this means there's a wealth of free resources, tutorials, youtube videos, podcasts and community support that's available to you. This can save you time and money on troubleshooting or hiring expensive developers. This can save you time and money on troubleshooting or hiring expensive developers, but even if you do need to hire a developer because WordPress is PHP and it's so popular it'll be easy to find one. So, from flexibility to cost effectiveness, wordpress is a really strong option and offers a bunch of advantages that, for many law firms that are looking to build up or start upgrading their presence, wordpress might be the right choice, but that's not the end of the story.

Speaker 1: 6:08

Now we have to talk about some of the cons of using WordPress for law firm Because, look, there are undeniable advantages here, but there are definitely some challenges too, and if you have a WordPress site and you were listening to those first few minutes, here's your fun part. For law firms, where professionalism, security and efficiency are one of our paramount concerns, these potential drawbacks warrant a close look. We need to understand what the potential drawbacks are and really understand before we make this decision about WordPress. And the first big con here is that there is a steep learning curve. Wordpress is, yes, very flexible, preeminently customizable, but this comes with a price. It is not the easiest platform to master and sometimes you need to code. So, unlike drag and drop builders like Wix or Squarespace, or even slightly more complex things like card, wordpress does require some technical knowledge to do things well. So tasks like installing themes, customizing layouts, troubleshooting issues some of this can feel pretty daunting if you're brand new to website management. For law firms that don't have in-house IT or web support, this means you're probably going to need to hire a developer to handle setup and then ongoing maintenance, and even with professional help, you still kind of need to familiarize yourself with the platform so that you can manage content updates, minor tweaks and manage your developer. This learning curve can be kind of burdensome for small law firms or solos if they're already stretched thin and there are some security risks. This isn't as big of a risk with some of the drag and drop builders it's a little bit more global with those guys.

Speaker 1: 7:49

But when it comes to WordPress, it's on us, and cybersecurity is becoming a serious concern for any law firm. And while WordPress does give us some options to deal with this, wordpress's popularity also makes it a really frequent target for hackers. Vulnerabilities can arise from outdated plugins, weak passwords, poorly configured hosting environments and a slew of other annoying things. And for a law firm where client confidentiality is critical, a breach could have legal and reputational consequences, especially when you have client information coming in through the website. So to mitigate this, we just have to stay proactive. It's a burden, for sure, but it's relatively simple to solve.

Speaker 1: 8:30

First, we want to make sure we're regularly backing up and updating our WordPress core themes and plugins, and we want to make sure we're using a reputable hosting provider that prioritizes security. I recommend WP Engine. I recommend WP Engine. They're not the cheapest but they have really strong support, great security and, if you're interested, check out the link in the show notes. Then we want to make sure we're installing security plugins like WordFriends or Securi to monitor the threats. If we have enough traffic where there are issues and we're getting spam and things like that, these are options that can help make sure we're locking down all the parts of our site that could be an issue. And, like I said in tip number one, we need to make sure we're backing up our site regularly to make sure we have really quick recovery if there's an issue. So we always want to be making sure we're backing up the site when we do an update in case something fails and we can revert. But we also just want to have a regular backup going in case there's a security issue. And while these measures are pretty effective when it comes to reducing the risks for security, we use all of these measures and we don't really have any security issues these things do require time and vigilance and this is something that you know. You're a busy lawyer. It could be hard to find the time.

Speaker 1: 9:46

One of the other big things that is a complaint about WordPress and personally, within Rosen Advertising and within my own experience, it's not a particularly big challenge, but this is an issue that comes up a lot and that is performance issues, and it's not what you're thinking of. This is related to the speed of your website, but a slow website it can be frustrating, just like other performance issues can be, and ultimately this hurts your search engine rankings. Unfortunately, performance issues, they're pretty common. Wordpress and patting it on the back doesn't really seem to help. What usually is going on is that there's a poorly optimized theme or plugin and essentially the amount of code we have on the website is just getting a little bit bloated. And when every second counts in retaining a visitor, sluggish load times equate to lost business. That's just sort of the story.

Speaker 1: 10:35

Many law firms fall into the trap of just overloading their site with features. This starts to bloat the site, make the package that it has to send to the user much larger, and it slows everything down. So this is things like adding multiple plugins for small tasks Think image galleries, form builders, carousels, social media integrations. All of this works together to strain your server's resources and what we want to do to maintain a fast website we can focus on a couple of things. First is choosing lightweight, high-performance themes or making sure we customize our theme to get rid of any non-essential code, and then we can focus on using only the essential plugins. If we can get one plugin to do two things, that's great, but we want to really focus on the things that are actually adding value to the site and eliminating the things that aren't. And finally, we make sure we optimize our images and then enable caching through plugins like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache. I personally love WP Rocket, but it can be a little aggressive at times.

Speaker 1: 11:35

But even with these optimizations, firms may still need some kind of professional support to diagnose and resolve more complex performance bottlenecks, and this is a big challenge and a big time consumer. And that leads us to another point, which is the overwhelming number of choices. One of WordPress' greatest strengths we talked about the flexibility and the customization is this vast library of themes and plugin, but this can also be WordPress' Achilles heel. With so many options available, it's really easy to start feeling overwhelmed. How do you know which plugin for contact forms is best Gravity Forms or Cognito or Contact Form 7? Or which theme actually aligns with my brand but is also fast and has the options I want for future scale. This choice paralysis can lead to complete indecision or worse, selecting options that just don't work well together and wasting money, and for law firms, this is just wasted time, wasted resources, and this is particularly true if you end up needing to backtrack and replace these poorly chosen tools. So I don't want this to sound like a sales episode, but if you're considering WordPress, you do want to consider consulting with a developer or a WordPress expert specifically, who understands the unique needs of law firms. They can recommend solutions that are proven to work and they can help steer you clear of any of the common pitfalls. Wordpress isn't an out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all solution, and these challenges show us why careful planning and ongoing management of the site are really essential.

Speaker 1: 13:09

But now let's talk about the fun part. There's been a little bit of drama around WordPress, a little bit of controversy, and let's talk about what this means for law firms that are looking to use the platform, because it's not a big deal, but you should know what's going on. So, first up is the Gutenberg editor controversy the Gutenberg editor, which you may have seen in your WordPress site, which was introduced in 2018, this was one of the big shifts in WordPress's history. This block-based editing system was designed to make content creation a lot more intuitive, visually appealing and help it compete with platforms like Squarespace. However, the transition from the classic editor was not really universally welcomed. For a lot of users, especially people like me and those that are accustomed to the old interface, gutenberg introduced a bunch of unnecessary complexity. Tasks that took a couple of clicks or some coding suddenly felt a lot more difficult. And on the flip side, there were supporters of Gutenberg that said, hey, this is more modern, it's future-proof, it's got a lot better design, flexibility doesn't require custom coding and it's going to bring more people to WordPress and for law firms. For us, this shift raised a key question Does Gutenberg actually improve our efficiency or does it slow the team down? But the story didn't end there.

Speaker 1: 14:27

One of WordPress's other strengths its really vast plugin ecosystem has sparked some controversy as well. As developers are shifting more towards subscription-based pricing models, the costs of many of the essential plugins that WordPress users use have risen significantly. This trend has frustrated a lot of users, who feel locked into paying recurring fees for functionality that they previously had with one-time purchases, and some plugins are being accused of some shady practices like bundling unnecessary features or failing to disclose ownership changes, and these issues lead to a lack of transparency, which makes it harder for us, as purchasers, to trust the tools that we rely on to run our businesses. What we need to do here is really just vet our plugins and vet our software. It's the same thing we're doing with all the software we run in the business, but it's something that we're just doing a little bit extra of with WordPress.

Speaker 1: 15:20

And finally, there's one more big piece of drama, and that's between the company that owns the trademark for WordPress Automatic, and a hosting company that I really like and have mentioned, wp Engine. Now, I'm not going to share my opinion on this, but there's a lot of debate around this, and I'm going to read from user David Fry on Reddit about the WordPress drama over the last couple of months and what's going on. David says that person is named Matt and he's one of the co-founders. While we've all thought of this as a community project, matt has a company Automatic and a nonprofit that plays key roles in the situation. There are many companies that specialize in hosting WordPress websites and Automatic is one of them, but one of their biggest competitors is WP Engine.

Speaker 1: 16:19

Automatic holds the trademark for WordPress, but everyone has been allowed to use WordPress in their branding. The way the law works if you don't defend a trademark, it can be difficult to enforce in the future. While Automatic probably couldn't win a trademark lawsuit against WP Engine, they were hoping to pressure WP Engine to pay 8% of their revenue to Automatic. Then, when WP Engine refused, matt from Automatic went ballistic and is engaged in a daily campaign of attacks against WP Engine, who are now suing Matt and Automatic. On there that one company seems to be annoyed at the other company for using their branding. But, as we've seen, wordpress branding has been used all across the internet, so perhaps the lawyers here can give me a little bit more information about the likely outcomes.

Speaker 1: 17:10

This is what the internet thinks of it at this point and, frankly, my opinion is let's all get back to work. But I don't write the rules for internet debates and, unfortunately, I don't think any of you do either. Now, why should you care about any of this? Because whatever choice you make here, whether it's embracing WordPress and Gutenberg or going to the plugins and using the classic editor all of this affects your WordPress sites performance, usability and costs, and understanding what the controversies are like and how the community is shifting and what potential risks there are to using this platform, is really critical to ensuring that you can adapt to what happens and make decisions that align with your firm's goals. Wordpress is going to remain a powerful tool unless something completely crazy happens in the next few months, but understanding this evolving landscape is really critical when it comes to leveraging this effectively for your practice. As I've said, I personally am a big fan of WordPress. We're not stopping anytime soon, but for today, that's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.