6 Essential Elements of a Mobile-Friendly Law Firm Website

Personal injury lawyers can no longer succeed merely by providing their clients with effective and aggressive representation. While this is still the primary duty of a personal injury attorney, to grow a thriving firm in the digital age, a personal injury lawyer must also have a strong website.

More specifically, they must have a strong mobile-friendly website. Statistics indicate mobile browsing is now more common than desktop browsing. Thus, a personal injury law firm’s website either needs a separate mobile version, or it at least must be designed so that users can easily navigate it on a small mobile device’s screen.

If you own a personal injury law firm, review your website via a mobile device to determine if it’s optimized properly. You may need to make some adjustments to ensure your website is making the right impression on potential clients.

Keep the following points in mind when doing so. Essential features of a mobile-friendly personal injury law firm website include:

Small Chunks of Text

You need to strike a balance when formatting text-heavy sections of your website. On the one hand, it’s critical that your pages provide users with thorough information. You want to establish yourself as an authority clients can trust to represent them professionally.

However, you also have to account for the fact that reading large chunks of text on a mobile device is somewhat difficult. Make your pages more “scannable” by breaking down text into smaller paragraphs.

Header and Similar Formatting Elements

Formatting elements such as headers and bullet-point lists can also help you condense sections of text similar to the way breaking up large paragraphs into smaller ones can. 

Just make sure you’re not using these elements randomly. For example, if you’re choosing to make a certain section of text a header, do so because you want this particular text to be more noticeable than the other text on the page. A header that highlights your success rate is more valuable than a header featuring bland language like “A personal injury law firm you can trust.”

Responsiveness

To apply this tip, you may need to coordinate with a developer if you lack the necessary technical expertise. In general, though, a “responsive” website is one that’s designed to automatically adjust its appearance based on the size of a user’s screen. The HTML code essentially “recognizes” the size of a screen and changes to match that size accordingly. By designing a responsive mobile-friendly site for your personal injury law firm, you can be relatively confident it will appear as it should for the majority of visitors.

Thumb-friendly Navigation

This is an easy quality to overlook when considering how to make your website more mobile-friendly. However, if you remember to prioritize this quality when redesigning your site, you’ll ensure a more intuitive and pleasant user experience.

Essentially, you want your site’s visitors to be able to navigate it entirely by using their thumbs. There shouldn’t, for instance, be any features on your site that require pinching. If your mobile site currently has such features, replace them.

Icons

Although you generally want the text sections of your site to be relatively thorough, there are ways you can reduce text (and therefore reduce clutter) without sacrificing quality. For example, instead of always using text-based calls to action or links, you can opt for icons instead. You simply need to use icons that are easily noticeable and clearly communicate to a user what they represent.

Limited Images

Your mobile-friendly personal injury law firm website shouldn’t be absolutely free of images. Images can help you break up text sections and help your website appear more dynamic.

However, your site may not need as many images as you assume. While including some images is certainly acceptable and even advisable, excessive images can cause a mobile site’s pages to load too slowly. Be aware, research indicates the average person will click away from a mobile page if it takes more than three seconds to load.

Most importantly, don’t underestimate the value of redesigning your site. Many potential clients seeking personal injury lawyers start researching firms via their mobile devices. You’ll be more likely to attract such clients if your site is mobile-friendly.