3 March 2026

I Audited 136 Solicitor Websites in North Yorkshire. Here's What I Found.

96% of solicitor websites in North Yorkshire fail basic accessibility checks.

That's not a typo. Of the 136 solicitor firm websites I audited across North Yorkshire, just 6 passed a standard accessibility test. The average mobile page took nearly 11 seconds to load its main content. Almost half had no valid SSL certificate.

These aren't obscure technical requirements. They affect whether potential clients can find you, trust you, and use your website. Most people now search for a solicitor on their phone, and these issues hit hardest on mobile.

Why I did this

I work with small businesses on their websites. I wanted to know what the baseline actually looks like for solicitors in North Yorkshire. Not based on assumptions, but on data.

I expected to find the usual mix: some good sites, some bad ones, most somewhere in the middle. What I didn't expect was how consistently poor the results would be across certain metrics. Accessibility and local SEO in particular were far worse than I anticipated.

This isn't a name-and-shame exercise. No individual firms are identified in any of the results below. The point is to show the landscape as it stands, and to give any solicitor reading this a clear picture of where the bar actually sits.

Methodology

I sourced 136 solicitor firm websites from Google Business Profiles, filtered to firms genuinely located in North Yorkshire, including York, Harrogate, Richmond, Skipton, Selby, and surrounding towns. Firm sizes ranged from micro (1–10 employees) to small (1–50 employees), based on Companies House records.

Each website was tested against five automated checks:

1. SSL certificate: is the connection secure, with a valid, unexpired certificate?
2. Page speed: Google PageSpeed Insights mobile performance score and Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, FCP, TBT)
3. Mobile-friendliness: does the site have a proper viewport meta tag and responsive setup?
4. Accessibility: automated WCAG 2.2 checks using axe-core (critical, serious, moderate, and minor violations)
5. Local SEO signals: structured data (schema markup), Google Business Profile links, and NAP (name, address, phone) consistency

One metric I really wanted to include was SRA price transparency compliance. I thought "this is the one I'm going to catch everyone out on!". Turns out I was wrong and every site I audited either had a prominent fees page, or fees on their service landing pages. Some of the listed fees didn't make much sense, and were ambiguous, but that's not for me to judge.

The findings

Accessibility: 96% fail

Only 6 of 136 sites passed a basic accessibility audit.

"Pass" here means zero critical or serious violations detected by axe-core, the industry-standard automated testing tool. This doesn't even cover the full WCAG 2.2 specification. It catches the obvious, machine-detectable issues like missing alt text, poor colour contrast, unlabelled form fields, and broken heading hierarchy.

The benchmark is straightforward: zero critical or serious violations. 130 sites failed to meet it.

By town, not a single firm in Richmond passed. York managed 4%. Harrogate was marginally better at 7%. Skipton had the highest pass rate at 12%, but that's still just 1 site out of 8.

Why this matters for solicitors: Accessibility isn't optional. Under the Equality Act 2010, service providers (including solicitors) have a duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people. A website that a screen reader can't navigate is a barrier to access. Beyond compliance, it's also a significant chunk of your potential client base. Around 1 in 5 people in the UK have a disability.

Local SEO: 95% fail

Only 7 of 136 sites pass on local SEO signals.

Local SEO is how potential clients find you when they search "solicitor near me" or "conveyancing solicitor Harrogate." The signals I measured were:

• Business name visible on the page: 62.5% (the one bright spot)
• Local business schema markup: 44.9%
• Address on the page: 16.9%
• Phone number on the page: 13.2%
• Link to Google Business Profile: 8.8%

Most firms display their name, but forget everything else. Only 16 sites use LocalBusiness schema markup, and just 6 use the more specific LegalService type. The majority that have any schema at all are using generic types like WebSite and Organization, which tell Google nothing about your practice area or location.

Why this matters for solicitors: Google uses structured data to understand what your business does and where it operates. Without it, you're relying entirely on Google to figure it out from page text, while competing against firms that have made it explicit. A missing Google Business Profile link is a missed opportunity to connect your website to your map listing.

SSL certificates: 43% fail

59 of 136 sites have no valid SSL certificate.

That means expired certificates, missing certificates, or HTTPS not properly configured. When a potential client visits one of these sites, their browser shows a warning: "Your connection is not private." The potential client never even sees the homepage.

Skipton had the worst SSL pass rate at just 38%. York and Harrogate performed slightly better at 61% and 63% respectively, but that still means roughly 4 in 10 firms in those towns have a broken or missing certificate.

Why this matters for solicitors: An SSL warning doesn't just reduce trust. It destroys it. Solicitors handle sensitive personal and financial information. If your website can't manage basic encryption, potential clients will draw their own conclusions. Google also factors HTTPS into search rankings, so an invalid certificate is costing you visibility as well as credibility.

Page speed: average mobile score of 60/100

Only 6% of sites score 90 or above on Google's mobile performance test.

Google PageSpeed Insights scores websites from 0 to 100. A score of 90+ is "good." 50–89 is "needs improvement." Below 50 is "poor."

The average score across the 131 sites with data was 60 out of 100. Nearly a quarter (24%) scored below 50.

But the headline number masks the real problem: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This measures how long it takes for the main content of the page to appear. Google considers anything under 2.5 seconds "good" and over 4 seconds "poor."

The average mobile LCP across the audit was 10.9 seconds. 84% of sites had an LCP over 4 seconds, which Google classifies as "poor." That means for most of these firms, a potential client searching on their phone will be staring at a half-loaded page for 5, 10, even 20 seconds.

Skipton was a standout: 100% of firms passed the PageSpeed threshold. Harrogate lagged at 57%.

Why this matters for solicitors: Google has been explicit that page speed affects search rankings, particularly on mobile. But beyond SEO, it's a client experience issue. Research consistently shows that users abandon pages that take more than 3 seconds to load. If your competitor's site loads in 2 seconds and yours takes 11, the client never sees your credentials.

Mobile-friendliness: 89% pass

This was the strongest metric. 121 of 136 sites passed.

The test checks whether the site has a proper viewport meta tag configured for mobile devices. This is the minimum requirement for a page to render correctly on a phone.

Harrogate led at 97%. York was lowest among the major towns at 81%, meaning roughly 1 in 5 York firms still have sites that don't render properly on mobile.

15 sites had no viewport tag at all. These sites will display as a tiny desktop layout on a phone screen, requiring users to pinch and zoom to read anything.

Why this matters for solicitors: Over 60% of Google searches now happen on mobile. If your site doesn't work on a phone, you're invisible to the majority of people looking for legal help. The good news: this is the easiest problem to fix. A single line of HTML in the page header resolves it.

How does your town compare?

Pass rates by town (towns with 5+ firms audited)

Some patterns stand out:

• Harrogate leads on mobile-friendliness (97%) but has the lowest PageSpeed pass rate (57%) among the major towns
• Richmond has the highest PageSpeed pass rate (80%) but zero firms passing accessibility
• Skipton is the only town where every firm passes the PageSpeed threshold, but has the worst SSL rate (38%)
• York, as the largest sample (54 firms), is a reliable benchmark and sits squarely in the middle on most metrics
• Selby leads on local SEO (20%) but the sample is small (5 firms)

No town performs well across the board. Every area has blind spots.

Smaller firms edge ahead on most metrics

Pass rates by firm size: micro (1–10 employees) vs small (1–50 employees)

Comparing micro firms (1–10 employees, 45 firms) against small firms (1–50 employees, 91 firms), the smaller firms perform better on most metrics:

• PageSpeed: 78% vs 69%. Smaller sites tend to be simpler and faster
• Accessibility: 7% vs 3%. Still dire for both, but micro firms are twice as likely to pass
• Local SEO: 9% vs 3%. Micro firms are three times more likely to have proper local signals
• SSL and mobile: roughly equal across both bands

The likely explanation: larger firms tend to have more complex websites. More pages, more features, more third-party scripts. That creates more opportunities for things to break. Smaller firms often have simpler sites that, by virtue of having less on them, avoid some of the common pitfalls.

The patterns

What the top-performing sites had in common:

• Valid SSL certificate with auto-renewal configured
• LocalBusiness or LegalService schema markup on the homepage
• A proper viewport meta tag (responsive design)
• Fast LCP, typically under 3 seconds, usually achieved with lightweight themes and minimal third-party scripts
• A link to their Google Business Profile

The most common failures:

• No accessibility consideration at all: missing alt text, poor contrast, unlabelled forms
• No local business schema (relying on generic WebSite or Organization types)
• No Google Business Profile link anywhere on the site
• Expired or misconfigured SSL certificates
• Heavy, slow-loading pages, often caused by unoptimised images or bloated page builders

What this means if you're a solicitor reading this

Here's a quick checklist you can run against your own site right now:

1. Check your SSL: Visit your site in Chrome. Is there a padlock icon in the address bar? If not, or if you see a warning, your certificate needs attention.

2. Test your speed: Go to PageSpeed Insights and enter your URL. Look at the mobile score and LCP. If your LCP is over 4 seconds, your site is losing potential clients.

3. Test your mobile layout: Open your site on your phone. Can you read the text without zooming? Can you tap buttons easily? If not, you need a viewport meta tag at minimum.

4. Check your accessibility: Run your homepage through WAVE. Fix any errors flagged in red. These are the critical issues.

5. Check your schema: Use Google's Rich Results Test on your homepage. Do you see LocalBusiness or LegalService? If not, you're missing an opportunity.

6. Link your Google Business Profile: If you have a GBP listing (you should), link to it from your website. It reinforces the connection between your site and your map listing.

7. Check SRA transparency: The SRA Transparency Rules require you to publish pricing information for certain services. Review the SRA guidance and check your own site manually.

None of these are expensive fixes. Most can be resolved in an afternoon. But the data shows that the vast majority of firms in the region haven't done them.

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If you're a solicitor in North Yorkshire and you want to know how your website compares, send me the URL. I'll tell you where you stand.