Transferring your website away from FindLaw
What you need to take ownership of your website and eliminate high monthly invoices
If you have a FindLaw site that isn’t performing as well as promised and you are up for renewal, you likely are wondering if it’s worth the high monthly cost to stay with FindLaw. You may have questions about how much traffic you are getting from FindLaw or how much traffic you stand to lose by transferring your site away from FindLaw. I have been helping people re-build their FindLaw websites since 2008. While there are a few things that need to be taken care of to ensure that the transfer goes well, there is no reason for you to continue paying FindLaw thousands of dollars a year to simply host your website.What Do I Need to Transfer My Website Away From FindLaw?
There are really just five things you need to maintain the presence that you have established with FindLaw. Obviously depending on your marketing goals, the fifth element can be very complex, or as simple as having someone be able to remove an attorney or make basic updates to the site every six or twelve months.1. Control of Your Domain Name
The domain name is how Google identifies your site, and how your potential clients find your site. If FindLaw originally registered your domain name, you can get them to transfer the domain to you. Typically, the person who builds your website would be well equipped to handle the transfer for you. The important part is that the domain name (after the transfer) is in the firm’s name. You do not want any other company (or worse yet, an individual that you could fall out of contact with) having control of your domain name.
2. A Place to Host Your Website
Your website is actually just a series of text, image and html files, and for people to be able to access your website, you need to put those files somewhere. This is called a hosting plan. If FIndLaw built your website, they are currently hosting it. GoDaddy and Bluehost are two very common and reliable web hosts. Owning your domain name and hosting package is what makes you able to keep your website up and running for about $100 a year.3. Someone To Rebuild Your Site
If you are leaving FindLaw, they will offer you “the files” that you need to host your website elsewhere. However, these files are typically stripped of their SEO coding and are typically not formatted in way where you can simply upload them. You will likely need to hire someone to re-build the website for you. When I work with law firms to rebuild their FindLaw sites, I build a new design, both to ensure that FindLaw doesn’t have any claim to the design, but also just to improve the look and feel of the site. Even if you like the general layout and color scheme of your current site, I will rebuild it as I have found the coding that FindLaw websites are is unnecessarily complex and difficult to manage. I rebuild FindLaw websites starting as low as $2,500. For more information see my page on pricing or contact me for a quote.4. Control of Your Google Map Listing / Understand where your traffic is coming from
It’s important that your website is set up to continue performing at the same (or higher) level as it was when you were with FindLaw. A big part of making that happen is understanding where your traffic is coming from, and ensuring those traffic sources will continue to work. With the exception of the FindLaw directory products (which you can actually keep in the rare case they are worth it) you can keep all of the relevant sources providing traffic to your website in place. In my opinion, the most important one is the Google map listing. If FindLaw set this up for you, it’s important to have them transfer access of that account, and then also make sure that it’s using your current phone number (not any tracking numbers they may have set up for you).
