Author: Gary Lilley | Date: 1 November 2023

Top 10 fastest law firm websites (ranked by google performance score)

Have you ever wondered which law firm websites load the fastest in the UK? Unsurprisingly: it’s a question we often contemplate at Legmark. A website that loads quickly is not merely practical and efficient; it holds numerous advantages over its slower counterparts.

Speed is a crucial part of the Legmark index used to generate the legal digital 200

Want to know where you rank out of over 3,200 law firms? Sign up to our dashboard now and start comparing.

Why is page speed so important?

Page speed is important for user experience:

On average, website users unconsciously expect loading times of under 2-3 seconds. According to Google, 53% of users will abandon a website if it takes longer to load than 3 seconds.

A study done by eggplant showed that :

Website speed is crucial for 88% of people in the UK and 85% of people in the USA.
In a survey of 3,200 people from the UK and USA, 80% find a consistently slow website more annoying than one that’s not working.
73% of people would leave a slow website and visit a competitor’s site instead.
Slow websites irritate 60% of users, while websites that are down only annoy 23%.

Just like consumers expect brick-and-mortar retail stores to be clean and to offer quick and attentive service, website users expect a website to load quickly, be easy to navigate, and provide easy access to information.

Page speed is crucial for a websites conversion rate.

As well as having horrifying consequences for user experience, you might also be losing out on potential customers or leads by not optimising your website’s speed to its fullest potential.

Akamai (one of the largest CDNs in the world) has conducted multiple studies on page speed and conversion rates. They have found that even an increase as small as 100 milliseconds can decrease conversion rates by as much as 7%.

Portent found that : “The highest e-commerce conversion rates occur between 1 and 2 seconds, spanning an average of 3.05% e-commerce conversion rate at 1 second, down to a 0.67% e-commerce conversion rate at a 4-second load time.”

To put this into perspective, imagine that 1,000 people are visiting a lead-capture page on your law firm’s website, and that every lead is, on average, worth 500 pounds.

A 1-second page load time at a 3.05% conversion rate results in £15,250.
A 2-second page load time at a 1.68% conversion rate results in £8,400.
A 3-second page load time at a 1.12% conversion rate results in £5,600.
A 4-second page load time at a 0.67% conversion rate results in £3,350.

Ensure that the web developer creating your law firms website is well-versed in the latest conversion optimisation strategies.

There are currently more than 3,200 law firms registered on our dashboard. All you need to do to access your data and that of your competitors is to sign up with your business email address (the one that matches your website address).

Page speed is one of the aspects of google’s core web vitals.

When Google first announced in 2010 that it would start incorporating website speed into its ranking factors, it caused a lot of webmasters to get nervous. The average loading time in 2010 was pretty horrendous compared to nowadays. CDNs and affordable hosting were also rare, further adding to the overall slowness.

In 2018, they implemented further changes specifically for mobile.

As of 2023, page speed is included under the “core web vitals” umbrella.

“We’re combining the signals derived from Core Web Vitals with our existing Search signals for page experience, including mobile-friendliness, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines, to provide a holistic picture of page experience.”

– Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results

While speed is indeed a ranking factor, it probably only comes into play when most other factors are equal. A highly relevant, slow website with a range of positive attributes will likely outrank an extremely fast one with poorly optimised content. However, as the playing field becomes more level, speed will increasingly matter.

How are we measuring website speed in this test?

To make the test as fair as possible we will be using the performance score from google’s pagespeed insights testing tool. We have chosen to include only lab results instead of field results. Field results are only shown in some instances and show actual real time statistics of user loading times. Lab results are generated by google in a simulated chrome browser. Although lab results lack the First Input Delay (FID) metric, it is one of the best indicators of website speed as well as being a controlled environment.

In this test we will only be taking performance into account.

*Example of a result on google’s pagespeed insight testing tool.*

The performance score can be further broken down into five unique metrics that each contribute to the overall score:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
How long it takes to load the largest part of the website that is visible on your screen. (for instance the largest image or paragraph)
Total Blocking Time
Calculates the total amount of time between the first content appearing on your screen and the point where the heavy background tasks have completed, and the webpage becomes responsive to user inputs
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Are there any unexpected layout shifts? For instance when loading an unoptimised page, text might jump around while images around it are still loading in. This will negatively affect the CLS score.
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
It signifies the point in the page load timeline when the user starts seeing actual content appearing on the screen, such as text, images, or non-white canvas elements.

Speed index
Google’s Speed Index is a performance metric that represents how quickly content is visually displayed during the loading of a webpage

*Example of a performance breakdown on google’s pagespeed insight testing tool.*

How did we conduct the test?

We first ran all 3000+ law firms from our dashboard through the google pagespeed api.

We then manually reviewed the top 100 websites and removed:

Websites that were merely single landing pages or contained very little content.
Websites lacking responsive designs.
Websites not utilising SSL.
Websites with broken layouts or those that were extremely outdated.

We then manually retested the the top-20 websites in the pagespeed insights tool.

It’s essential to be aware that performance scores may vary slightly throughout the day. Should you believe that there is a law firm we have overlooked, or if we have evaluated something inaccurately, please do not hesitate to contact us.

These are the websites with the fastest performance scores, measured on the 30th of October.

ellisjones.co.uk	100
legmark.com	99
tmemploymentlaw.co.uk	99
mrhsolicitors.co.uk	98
hatchbrenner.co.uk	98
vewhitesolicitors.co.uk	98
wilkinchapman.co.uk	97
jamesmurraylaw.com	96
footanstey.com	96
harrowells.co.uk	96

There are currently more than 3,200 law firms registered on our dashboard.

In addition, we release an updated version of our proprietary ‘Legmark Rank’ each month, so you can see how you stack up against your competitors and access over 35,000 bits of data on your website and any of the other law firms.

This includes how many backlinks they have, what their domain authority is, how well trusted their site is, how fast it loads, and much more. Compare your data with the rest of the sector to see where you need to improve and get a fresh report every month.