Law firm leadership evaluating a website redesign almost always arrives at the same first question: what should this actually cost? The honest answer is that it depends heavily on scope, but understanding the factors that actually drive cost helps firms budget realistically and avoid both dramatic overspending and the kind of underinvestment that produces a site failing to meet its actual objectives.

The single biggest cost driver is content volume and complexity — a firm with a handful of practice areas and a small team requires meaningfully less design and development work than a multi-office firm with dozens of attorneys, complex practice area taxonomies, and extensive case study or resource libraries. Firms should think honestly about their actual content scope before benchmarking cost expectations against a competitor’s site that may be solving a very different problem.

Custom functionality significantly affects cost as well. A relatively standard brochure-style site with straightforward pages costs considerably less than a site requiring custom features — sophisticated attorney directory filtering, case evaluation tools, integration with practice management or CRM systems, custom animation and interactive elements. Firms should distinguish clearly between functionality that’s genuinely necessary and functionality that’s simply appealing, since the latter can meaningfully inflate cost without proportional business value.

Ongoing costs beyond the initial build deserve equal consideration in any realistic budget — hosting, maintenance, content updates, and eventual iteration as the firm’s needs evolve. Firms that budget only for the initial launch, without accounting for these ongoing costs, frequently find themselves under-resourced for the maintenance that keeps a site performing well over its full lifespan.

The firms that get the strongest return on their website investment aren’t necessarily the ones spending the most — they’re the ones whose spending is deliberately aligned with genuine strategic priorities rather than either arbitrary cost minimization or unfocused feature accumulation.

Want a realistic, transparent estimate for your firm’s website redesign? Reach out to Sixty Five Design — 323-229-9800, hello@sixtyfivedesign.com, /contact-us.