The writing is on the wall
Justia runs on WordPress.
The rest of the web left WordPress behind.
WordPress is 2003 PHP server-rendering — rebuilt endlessly with plugins, themes, and workarounds because the core was never designed for what people are asking it to do. The industry moved to modern compiled frameworks. Justia did not. Your site is paying the price.
What you are paying for
Justia puts a prom dress on a WordPress pig and charges you monthly to rent it.
You own nothing. A WordPress theme on a shared host on their subdomain. Stop paying — it disappears.
The platform is WordPress. One plugin update from a broken site. One vulnerability from a data exposure.
None of this was built for you. You are one of tens of thousands of attorneys on the same installation. Justia's economics depend on that.
The technology
WordPress was built in 2003 to run a blog. It has not gotten better.
WordPress was designed for one person to publish articles. Everything else — forms, SEO, speed, security — is a plugin written by someone you have never heard of, running code you have never seen.
The "modern" look is a theme bolted on top. The theme can change. The 20-year-old foundation cannot.
Hackers don't care about your niche. They target WordPress because it is everywhere, it is predictable, and it is full of plugins written by people who have since moved on. When a new vulnerability drops, 43% of the internet is exposed at once.
Slow by default
WordPress loads dozens of JavaScript files, CSS sheets, and plugins on every page request. Google's Core Web Vitals penalize slow sites. A slow site buries you in search.
Security is a patch job
WordPress has had over 30,000 known security vulnerabilities catalogued. Keeping it secure requires constant updates to the core, theme, and every plugin — and most attorneys' sites are months or years out of date.
You rent, not own
Justia can change your listing, reprice the tier, or delist you at any time. Everything you build on their platform belongs to their domain, not yours.
Professional liability
Your client intake form is running on software with 7,966 known vulnerabilities.
In 2024, security researchers disclosed nearly 8,000 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem — a 34% increase over the prior year. Ninety-six percent of them were in third-party plugins. The contact form on your site is almost certainly one of them.
When a prospective client fills out your intake form — their name, their loss amount, their broker, their account details — that data passes through plugin code written by developers you have never heard of, maintained on schedules you cannot verify, running on a server you do not control. That is not a technology problem. That is a professional responsibility problem.
7,966
new WordPress vulnerabilities
disclosed in 2024
96% were in plugins — not WordPress core. Every plugin on your site is a potential entry point.
34% increase year over year. The attack surface grows every year you stay on the platform.
58% required no authentication to exploit — meaning no login, no credentials, no inside access needed.
A data breach involving client intake information is not a tech support ticket. It is a bar complaint. WordPress does not know you are an attorney and does not care.
The admin panel
WordPress was built for bloggers. Your practice is not a blog.
The WordPress dashboard was designed in 2003 so a single person could write and publish articles. That is still exactly what it does. To do anything else — add a case result, update a fee structure, manage intake forms, display FINRA data — you are installing a plugin written by a stranger, hoping it does not conflict with your theme, and praying the developer still maintains it.
The result is an admin panel that is simultaneously overwhelming and incapable. Hundreds of menus built for generic use cases. None of them built for yours.
WordPress — locked, generic, broken
A panel built for your practice
WordPress was built so bloggers could publish articles in 2003. It was never designed for a securities attorney trying to rank against Justia, convert an anxious investor, and maintain a professional presence that reflects twenty years of case results. It shows.
The trajectory
Server-rendered PHP is a dying format.
WordPress rebuilds every page from scratch on every visit — on a shared server. The industry moved on. Google noticed. The numbers below are the result.
30%
of WordPress sites pass
Google's Core Web Vitals
Seven out of ten WordPress sites fail the performance benchmarks Google uses directly in its ranking algorithm. That means seven out of ten WordPress attorneys are being penalized in search — every single day — because of the platform they chose.
Core Web Vitals measure how fast your page loads, how stable it is as it loads, and how quickly it responds to input. Fail any one of them and Google buries you. HTTP Archive Web Almanac
Google Lighthouse scores — audits of live attorney sites
Based on audits of active Justia-hosted attorney sitesPerformance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO
Lighthouse Performance scores below 50 trigger Google ranking penalties. The median WordPress site delivers 521 KB of JavaScript to visitors — before any plugins or theme scripts are added. HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2022
53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. The average WordPress site on shared hosting loads in 4–7 seconds on mobile. You are losing more than half your potential clients before they read a single word. Google / Think with Google
WordPress / Justia
- — Server generates HTML on every request
- — Shared hosting, unpredictable load times
- — Plugin ecosystem from 2010
- — Google ranking declining year-over-year
- — You cannot change the infrastructure
Svelte / Cloudflare
- + Pre-compiled static files served from the edge
- + Sub-100ms load times globally
- + No plugins, no attack surface
- + Lighthouse scores that actually impress Google
- + You own every byte of it
What we build in
The most loved framework in software development. Deployed on infrastructure built for banks.
Svelte has been ranked the most loved and most wanted web framework in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for three consecutive years. It is the fastest growing framework in the industry — not because it is trendy, but because developers who use it refuse to go back. The reason is simple: it produces less code, ships less to the browser, and runs faster than anything else available.
We pair it with Cloudflare Pages — the same infrastructure that protects governments, banks, and Fortune 500 companies. Your site runs on 330+ edge locations worldwide. There is no server to patch, no hosting bill to renew, no shared environment to compromise.
While your competitors are filing support tickets with Justia and waiting for their WordPress plugin to stop breaking, your site is already loaded, already indexed, and already converting. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a different league.
AI is a direct threat to WordPress
AI is rewriting what a website needs to do. WordPress cannot keep up.
The next generation of attorney websites does not just display information — it qualifies leads, responds to investor questions, and routes cases before anyone picks up the phone. That requires real software. WordPress is a blog platform. It cannot do any of this without duct-taping a third-party chatbot widget onto a page and hoping it does not conflict with four other plugins.
A Svelte site is code. AI is code. They work together natively. What follows is what that looks like in practice.
AI-powered intake — built into the page
A streaming AI assistant that asks an investor about their loss — broker name, account type, amount, what happened — and qualifies the case before they ever pick up the phone. Not a chatbot widget from a third party. Your questions, your logic, running on your site.
Multiple languages — proper routes, not a Google Translate button
Spanish, Mandarin, Portuguese — fully translated routes at /es/, /zh/, /pt/ with correct hreflang tags so Google indexes each language separately. Investors who are more comfortable in another language find you in that language. WordPress can fake this with a plugin. Svelte does it properly.
Live FINRA data on your public site
Your arbitration record, win rate, and case history surfaced directly on your site — pulled from myArb and displayed in real time. An investor can see your track record before they call. No plugin. No copy-paste updates. Live data.
Smart intake forms that adapt to the investor's answers
Lost money in a variable annuity? The form asks different follow-up questions than a margin call loss. Account concentrated in one stock? Different path again. WordPress forms are static. A Svelte form is logic — it responds to what the investor tells you and collects exactly what you need to evaluate the case.
Any feature you can describe — we can build
A case result calculator. An arbitrator lookup. A broker check integration. A client portal. Because your site is real software on a real infrastructure, adding a feature is a development conversation — not a prayer that a WordPress plugin exists for it and still works.
What your site should actually do
A securities attorney site has one job: convert an anxious investor into a client.
Show up when investors search
Your site needs to rank for "can I sue my broker in [your city]." You need your own domain, your own authority, your own schema markup — not a subdomain on someone else's site.
Establish credibility in five seconds
Case results in dollar amounts. Your face. Your credentials. Contingency fee language. The investor who lost $200,000 needs to know immediately that you have won cases like theirs — not read a generic "experienced attorney" paragraph.
Make contact frictionless
Phone number above the fold. A real free consultation form that does not look like a government document. An attorney who picks up the phone. The first firm an investor can actually reach is usually the firm they hire.
Load fast enough that they do not leave
The average user abandons a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. A Justia-hosted WordPress site regularly takes 6–10 seconds on mobile. You lose half your visitors before they read a word.
The offer
We convert your existing site — Justia, WordPress, or otherwise — for a flat $500.
We are not designing a new site from scratch and we are not reinventing your brand. We take exactly what you have — your content, your structure, your pages — and convert it into a modern Svelte codebase deployed on Cloudflare's global edge. Same site. Dramatically better infrastructure.
The result loads faster, ranks higher, and costs nothing to host.
5-year cost comparison
Justia Elevate published at $82.50/mo (annual plan). WordPress estimate based on WP Engine at $35/mo plus theme ($100/yr), security plugin ($120/yr), and one developer fix per year. All figures over 5 years.
What's included
Full Svelte rebuild — every page, every section
Home, about, practice areas, case results, contact — rebuilt from scratch in a modern framework that compiles to lean, fast static files.
Modern TypeScript interactivity
Live case result filtering. Real-time form validation. Reactive navigation. Dynamic intake forms that respond to what the client types. Typed, maintainable code — not jQuery, not a plugin from 2019.
Deployed to Cloudflare — FREE hosting, your domain
330+ global edge locations. Sub-second load times worldwide. No shared hosting, no server to patch, no Justia in the middle.
SEO built specifically for securities attorneys
Legal schema markup (LegalService, Attorney, FAQPage), canonical tags, meta titles written for investor-intent searches. Your site tells Google exactly what you do and where you do it.
City pages targeting your local investor searches
Dedicated pages for every market you serve — structured around the exact queries investors type. Securities attorney in [city]. Each page indexed, each page yours.
Sitemap, robots.txt, and technical SEO foundations
Everything Google needs to crawl, index, and understand your site — configured correctly from day one, not bolted on later with a plugin.
Ongoing site audit scores
Run a scored audit at any time — design, credentials, conversion signals, search visibility. Track your ranking against competitors over time.
Custom branded HTML emails
Intake confirmations, follow-up sequences, and client communications built to match your site — not a MailChimp template. Pixel-perfect, on-brand, and yours.
Pricing
$500 flat, one time
Code written for your site. Not a template.
Built on cutting-edge web technology.
Uncompromising performance.
48–72 hour turnaround.
Whatever you pay Justia monthly, you are paying to rank their domain — not yours. That bill compounds every year with nothing to show for it.
Not ready to commit? Start with the free audit.
See exactly how your current site scores — design, credentials, conversion signals, and search visibility. No email required.