The Law Firm Website Scorecard: 25 Plaintiff-Firm Homepages, Measured
We measured 25 plaintiff-firm homepages for speed, weight, structured data, security policy, tracking and AI-agent readiness. The median page weighed 2.2 MB on a phone and scored 42 of 100 on readiness.
Wolfe Services · · 7 min read
Updated
Every agency pitch to a law firm includes a claim about speed, and almost none of them include a number you can check. We wanted a reference point that was not our own client list. So on October 16, 2026 we measured the homepages of 29 plaintiff-side firms, personal injury and employment, in markets across Texas, Illinois, Georgia, New York, the DC area, California and Florida, plus several national practices. Twenty-five could be measured. Two refused automated requests and two did not answer within twelve seconds.
We are not naming the firms. The point is the field, not any one practice, and a website is only one part of how a firm wins cases. What follows is what the field looks like when you measure it instead of describing it.
Why this matters
Take two firms in the same city: the same practice, the same years at the bar, the same verdicts on the wall, the same pages saying the same things. Give one of them the median homepage in this field and the other the site we measured against it. Google has said, in its own words, what happens when the content is a draw:
While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.
Google Search Central, Evaluating page experience for a better web, May 2020
That was the announcement that Core Web Vitals would join Google’s ranking signals. The current documentation is shorter: “Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems.” In a plaintiff market the content is a draw more often than firms admit. The same practice pages, the same settlement lists, the same reviews on the same platforms. What is left to separate two firms is the part nobody at either firm looks at.
Firm Athe median homepage in the field
vsFirm Bthe reference build, same day
held equalpractice · market · years at the bar · pages · reviews
Readiness scorehigher is better
Homepage weight on a phonelower is better
Script named in the pagelower is better
Lighthouse mobile performancehigher is better
“…in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.”
Google Search Central, Evaluating page experience for a better web, May 2020
The median homepage here takes 5.9 seconds to paint its largest element on a phone, against Google’s threshold of 2.5. The firm with the lighter site does not win because it is the better firm. On Google’s own account, it is the one of the two that passed the test. We did not measure rankings for any site in this field, and the limits below say so. What the exhibit shows is the measured gap between an ordinary homepage and one built to pass.
How we measured
Each homepage got two passes. Our readiness scan fetched the page the way a crawler does, read every script it names, and recorded the structured data, image formats, security headers, cache lifetimes, third-party tags, llms.txt and robots.txt. Lighthouse, the engine behind Google’s PageSpeed Insights, then loaded the page once as a mid-range phone on a slow mobile connection, and once more with its newer Agentic Browsing category.
Lighthouse mobile scores move between runs. Our own homepage ranged from 92 to 100 across five runs the day before. So treat any single site’s score as approximate and the medians as the finding. The readiness score is our own rubric, published with its weights on the readiness page, so you can disagree with a weight and still use the measurement underneath it.
What a phone has to download
| Measure | Median | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse mobile performance | 62 | 46–99 |
| Largest Contentful Paint (simulated) | 5.9 s | |
| Total page weight | 2,179 KB | 232 KB–10.9 MB |
| JavaScript named in the page (uncompressed) | 333 KB | up to 2 MB |
Twelve of the 25 shipped more than 400 KB of script before counting anything a tag manager adds after the page opens. That is work a phone has to do before the text settles, and work an agent has to wait through for every firm it compares.
Images explain much of the rest of the weight. Seven sites served most of their images as WebP or AVIF. Only one served any AVIF, the format that usually comes out smallest.
Four of the 25 scored 90 or better on mobile. Google treats a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds as good; the median here was more than twice that in Lighthouse’s phone simulation.
The lightest homepage in the set weighed 232 KB, the same as ours on the day we measured it. A light law firm homepage is already possible on ordinary technology. The heavy ones are a choice, usually a choice nobody at the firm remembers making.
What the page says about the firm
This part went better than we expected. Fifteen of the 25 declared a legal-service type in their structured data and described it in some depth, and only two had no structured data at all. Eleven published an llms.txt file, the plain-text index for AI systems, and two of those failed Lighthouse’s basic checks for it. We suspect SEO plugins generated many of them, though we did not verify how each file was made.
15 of 25
Describe a legal service in depth in structured data
11 of 25
Publish an llms.txt index
0 of 25
Offer a Markdown copy of the homepage
0 of 25
Block the major AI crawlers
9 of 25
Pass every Lighthouse Agentic Browsing check
14 of 25
Fail its accessibility-tree check
None offered a Markdown copy of the homepage. None blocked the major AI crawlers in robots.txt.
Lighthouse’s Agentic Browsing category asks whether software acting for a person could use the page. Fourteen of the 25 failed its accessibility-tree check, which looks for named buttons, labelled form fields and a sensible structure. One failed on layout shift. Nine passed every check that applied to them. The failures are not exotic: an icon with no name, a form field with no label, a menu an agent cannot follow. They are the same things that fail a screen reader, and they have been fixable for twenty years.
Who else is on the page
Google Tag Manager appeared on 22 of the 25 homepages. Nine named a Meta Pixel and six named a session-recording tool, which records how visitors move and click. The median homepage named three known third-party tags, and that is a floor. A tag manager can load any number of further tags after the page opens.
22 of 25
Google Tag Manager on the page
9 of 25
A Meta Pixel named in the page
6 of 25
A session-recording tool
3 of 25
Send a Content Security Policy
0 of 25
A policy that restricts scripts
21 of 25
Cache static files 30 days or more
None of that is unusual for marketing sites, and some of it is useful. It does mean that an injured person’s first visit to the firm is shared with several other companies by default. It also adds weight, so each tag costs some speed.
A Content Security Policy is a header that tells the browser which scripts a page is allowed to run. Without one, a compromised plugin or tag can run anything on the page, including on the intake form. Three of the 25 sent a policy at all. None of the three restricted scripts. Long caching for static files was the bright spot: 21 of 25 let a returning visitor’s browser reuse scripts and styles for a month or more.
Limits
This is 25 homepages chosen from search results, not a random sample of law firms. We measured homepages only, with one Lighthouse run each, and script sizes are uncompressed. The readiness score uses our rubric, which is published with its weights. None of it says anything about rankings, calls or signed cases, and we did not try to connect it to them. Anyone who tells you a page-weight number predicts your case volume is guessing.
Check your own homepage against the field
- Run PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Is the performance score above 62, and is Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds?
- Check the total page weight in the same report. Is it under the 2.2 MB median?
- Ask your developer which scripts run on the intake form page, and who decided each one should be there.
- Check whether the site sends a Content Security Policy header, and whether it restricts scripts.
- Run the readiness score to see the same ten measurements for your site, placed on the strip above, next to a site we built.
Next step
The diagnosis comes before the engagement.
If this describes your firm, request a private Architecture Review of your website, search, attribution, vendors, and intake system. One document, written for the partner who signs.