For attorneys on Justia
WordPress and Justia are relics of a pre-AI web. What worked ten years ago is killing you now.
Justia Elevate is PHP and WordPress with a rented theme on top, billed monthly, forever. That was a defensible choice a decade ago. In a world where a website is expected to answer questions, qualify a client, and load before the thumb leaves the screen, it is the slowest, most expensive, and least secure way to put a law firm online. And you do not own the result.
We audited the websites of PIABA member firms. The ones on Justia scored the worst of any group. This page is why.
How old is old
Fine in 2012. Inexcusable in the age of AI.
Web technology turns over roughly every five years. Justia’s stack has not turned over once. The rest of the world went from templates to software. Your site is still a template.
- 1995
PHP is written as a set of personal home page scripts. It is a good idea for 1995.
- 2003
WordPress 0.7 ships as a blogging tool. The same year, Justia is founded by the man who built and sold FindLaw.
- 2010
The theme and plugin economy takes over WordPress. Every feature becomes someone else’s code bolted onto a blog.
- 2016
The industry moves to compiled frameworks and pre-built pages. Sites stop being assembled on a server for every visitor.
- 2021
Google makes Core Web Vitals a ranking signal. Slow pages start losing positions to fast ones.
- 2024
PHP is no longer a top-ten language in the TIOBE index. Nearly 8,000 new WordPress vulnerabilities are disclosed in a single year.
- Today
AI answers the investor’s first question before they ever call. A theme cannot do that. Justia is still selling the 2003 stack, by the month, to attorneys who compete on Google.
The language
PHP is a language in retreat. Your site is written in it.
PHP still exists for one reason: WordPress. Strip that out and it is a legacy language. The frameworks that replaced it compile your site ahead of time and ship it from a data center near the visitor. PHP cannot do that. It was never designed to.
Nobody starts anything in it
Ask a developer under forty to build something new in PHP and watch the face. The modern web is written in TypeScript, compiled ahead of time, and served from the edge. PHP survives because of the installed base, not because anyone chooses it.
The talent left
Developer surveys have ranked PHP among the most dreaded languages for a decade. The people who remain are maintaining legacy systems. That is who is on the other end of your support ticket.
The model is the problem
PHP builds your page from scratch, on a server, every time someone visits. Database query, template, plugins, then ship. A modern site is built once and delivered instantly from a location near the visitor. One of these approaches is measurably faster. Google measures it.
The platform
WordPress was built to run a blog. It has been apologizing with plugins ever since.
Justia describes Elevate as a customized WordPress platform. That sentence is the whole problem. Customizing WordPress means adding more third-party code to a 2003 core, and every addition makes the site slower and easier to break into.
A blog engine wearing a suit
WordPress was designed so one person could publish articles. Forms, SEO, speed, security, backups, spam: all of it is a plugin written by someone you have never heard of, running on your client-facing site.
The attack surface grows every year
Patchstack counted 7,966 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2024, up 34 percent from the year before. Ninety-six percent were in plugins. Your intake form, with an investor’s loss amount and broker name, runs through that code.
Slow on purpose
Google Fonts pulled from a third-party CDN. Render-blocking scripts. Half a megabyte of JavaScript before the theme adds its own. Roughly seven in ten WordPress sites fail Core Web Vitals. Every one of them is being marked down in search.
The blog on someone else’s domain
Justia frequently runs the blog on a separate WordPress install, often on a different domain entirely. Years of your writing build authority for a domain that is not yours.
Sources: Patchstack, State of WordPress Security 2024. HTTP Archive Web Almanac, CMS chapter.
Themes
Themes are an insult to your readers’ intelligence and to your firm.
On WordPress the look of your site is a theme: a layout someone else drew years ago, sold by the thousand. On Justia the theme is theirs, on their servers, behind a layer you cannot touch. It is an insult twice over.
One theme. Hundreds of firms. Find yours.
Wireframes of one Justia Elevate template, names changed. The gavel is always there.
To your readers
A prospect with a real problem lands on your site and is handed a layout they have already seen on a hundred other firms. The message is that you assumed they would not notice. They notice. They have been on the internet for twenty years and can spot a template before the hero image finishes loading. A theme tells the smartest client you will ever have that you thought they were stupid.
To your firm
Twenty years of practice, real verdicts, real credentials, a reputation built one case at a time, poured into a container designed for nobody and shared with everyone, with a stock gavel on top. Whatever makes your firm worth hiring is exactly what a theme is built to ignore, because a theme cannot know it. You are presented as a commodity by the vendor you pay to present you.
A modern law firm site is software. A theme is a brochure. One of these is a program. The other is a PDF that happens to be online.
- The internet has moved past themes. They are predictable. They are lazy.
- Hundreds of other law firms have your website. Same layout, same header, same stock gavel, your name typed in where the last firm’s was.
- You did not buy a website. You bought a subscription to looking like everyone else.
- A theme is what a web shop sells when it has run out of ideas, or never had any. Justia’s whole model is not having to think about you.
- A theme is static by design. It shows the same page to every visitor until a human edits it by hand. It cannot answer a question, qualify a lead, or build a page on its own.
The theme trap
Dependence on the theme is dependence on Justia.
On WordPress the look of your site is a theme. On Justia the theme is theirs, on their servers, behind a proprietary layer you cannot touch. Leave the theme and you leave with nothing.
- Every Justia site is drawn from the same template library. A visitor who has seen one has seen yours.
- The look is a theme. Change the theme and you start over. Update the theme and your customizations break.
- Layout changes, new page types, and anything structural require a support ticket. You do not have code access.
- Justia has declined requests to migrate clients to standard WordPress. The proprietary layer is the lock.
- Cancel and the theme, the pages, the URLs, and the backlinks go dark together. There is no export.
The bill
The $82.50 is the door, not the room.
Justia publishes exactly one price. Everything else is a sales call. Here is what five years on the platform actually costs a firm, using their own published minimum and the add-ons most firms end up buying.
| Headshot, logo, copywriting you supply before Justia touches anything | $1,000 to $5,000 |
| Justia Elevate, five years, at the published minimum | $4,950 |
| The WordPress server underneath it, five years, at GoDaddy’s renewal rate | $900 |
| Justia Elevate, five years, with typical add-ons | $9,000 to $15,000 |
| Rebuilding from zero when you leave, because you own nothing | $5,000 to $15,000 |
| Five-year cost of a site you will never own | $17,000 to $36,000 |
Sold separately
- Justia Connect Pro directory placement
- Premium directory tiers, quote only
- PPC management, quote only
- Social media, quote only
- Content beyond the AI writer
Monthly hosting for a Diogenes build. A law firm’s traffic fits inside Cloudflare’s free tier with room to spare. One build fee, then nothing, and the code is yours.
Ownership
You are paying monthly to advertise Justia on your own website.
Every Elevate site carries a Justia credit in the footer, on every page, for every visitor. Your prospective client is shown someone else’s brand on your letterhead.
The SEO equity you build accrues to Justia’s domain authority, not yours. Nine million monthly visitors did not come from your blog. Your blog is one of the thousands feeding theirs.
Stop paying and the site goes dark. Pages, posts, URLs, backlinks. Justia will not hand the codebase to a new agency. There is no migration path because there was never meant to be one.
Side by side
Same firm. Two stacks.
| Justia Elevate | Diogenes build | |
|---|---|---|
| Technology | PHP, WordPress, themes, plugins | Compiled SvelteKit, TypeScript, zero plugins |
| Where it runs | Apache on shared servers | Cloudflare edge, 330+ locations |
| Monthly cost | $82.50 to $250+ | $0. Free tier covers a law firm. |
| Who owns the site | Justia. You hold a license. | You. Code, domain, content. |
| Lighthouse performance | 40 to 65 | 95 to 100 |
| Fonts | Google Fonts from a CDN | Self-hosted, preloaded |
| City pages with schema | No | Yes |
| FAQ structured data | No | Yes |
| Footer | Justia’s logo | Yours |
| If you stop paying | Site disappears | Nothing happens. It is yours. |
The age of AI
A brochure cannot answer a question. Software can.
The site that wins the next decade asks the investor what happened, understands the answer, and routes the case before anyone picks up the phone. That takes a real codebase. Justia’s answer to AI is an add-on that writes blog posts. For their domain.
Intake that thinks
An assistant on the page asks the investor about the broker, the product, the loss, and what happened, then qualifies the matter and hands your staff a summary. On WordPress this is a plugin from a stranger. On a real codebase it is a feature.
Answers, not brochures
Investors now ask search engines and AI assistants full questions. Sites that are fast, structured, and specific get cited. A slow template with generic schema gets skipped.
Anything you can describe
A case-result calculator. A broker lookup. A client portal. Your FINRA record on the page. When the site is software you own, adding a capability is an afternoon, not a support ticket to Saltillo.
Why we care
Justia is the internet’s version of a bucket shop.
For thirty years we have gone after bad stockbrokers on behalf of the investors they hurt. We go after bad web design and bad web services with the same zeal.
You know what a bucket shop is. One product, thousands of marks, a charge that arrives every month, and nothing the customer ever owns. A monthly fee for an asset that never becomes yours, sold to a professional who does not have time to read the fine print, by a company that profits from keeping it that way. Change the nouns and it is the same case we have been building since 1993.
Antique code. Modern invoice.
The short version
If a colleague asked.
You are renting a generic website from a company that puts its own logo on it, charges you monthly forever, and takes everything back the day you stop paying. The site is slow, it looks like every other Justia attorney, and every month you pay them you are building their brand instead of yours. Own something instead.
The full ledger
27 things WordPress cannot do, or does badly, that you are paying for monthly.
For the colleague who wants the whole list. Every item is a property of the platform, not a complaint about one site.
Architecture
- Every page is assembled on the server, per visit: PHP boots, queries MySQL, runs the theme, runs every plugin, then ships. A modern site is built once and served from the edge.
- No build step, no compiler, no type checking. Errors are found by visitors.
- One monolith: theme, plugins, admin, content, and database all live in one process on one box. One bad plugin update takes down the whole site.
- Runs on a single origin server. The “CDN” is a caching plugin bolted on the front, and it breaks on anything dynamic.
Performance
- Google Fonts and third-party scripts by default in most themes: 15 to 25 Lighthouse points gone before you add content.
- Themes ship CSS and JavaScript for every feature the theme author imagined, whether you use it or not.
- jQuery is still loaded on most installs. It is from 2006.
- Images are uploaded at whatever size the attorney had and served that way, unless yet another plugin resizes them.
- Roughly seven in ten WordPress sites fail Core Web Vitals. Google ranks on it.
Security
- 7,966 new vulnerabilities disclosed in 2024, 96 percent of them in plugins. Your intake form runs through that code.
- /wp-login.php and /wp-admin sit on every site at the same URL. Bots hit them all day.
- /wp-json exposes usernames and content structure to anyone, by default.
- Plugins run with full database access. There is no sandbox.
- Updates are the attorney’s job, or nobody’s. Plugin auto-update is off by default on most managed hosts.
Plugins
- Every real feature (forms, SEO, caching, backups, spam, security) is a plugin written by a stranger, on its own update schedule, with its own bugs.
- Plugins conflict with each other. The standard debugging method is “disable them one at a time.”
- Abandoned plugins stay installed, unpatched, for years.
- Each plugin adds database tables and admin cruft that survive its removal.
Content and SEO
- Structured data (LegalService, FAQPage, city pages) is generic or absent unless someone hand-configures yet another plugin.
- WYSIWYG editing produces inline styles and nested divs. The HTML is unreadable and the layout drifts from page to page.
- The blog is friction-heavy enough that most attorneys post twice a year. One live Justia site we audited: two posts in fourteen months.
- No real components. Change the footer and you edit a theme file that the next theme update overwrites.
Ownership, the Justia flavor
- The theme is proprietary and on Justia’s servers. No code access, no export.
- Justia will not migrate a client to standard WordPress. Cancel and the pages, URLs, and backlinks go dark together.
- Justia’s logo in your footer, and Justia’s domain collecting your blog’s authority.
The ceiling
- It cannot do anything it was not built to do without a plugin or a PHP developer: no AI intake, no case-result calculator, no client portal, no broker lookup.
- It cannot answer a question. It is a brochure with a login page.
Sources: Patchstack, State of WordPress Security 2024. HTTP Archive Web Almanac. Diogenes audits of PIABA member sites.
The peak
WordPress has peaked. Justia's whole business is still riding on it.
For twenty years the answer to “what should we build it on” was WordPress. That stopped being true, and the numbers show when. The platform is off its high, losing ground faster each quarter, and shedding staff at the company that owns it. You are paying by the month to stand on the downslope.
Share of the web, 43.6 percent to 41.5 percent
The first sustained decline in over a decade, and it is speeding up. WordPress gave up more ground in the five months after December 2025 than in the whole of 2025. Declines do not usually reverse once they accelerate.
Share of newly built sites
Two years ago a slim majority of new sites were WordPress. Now it is a minority: 43 percent in the first quarter of 2026, down from 51. Nobody is choosing it for new work at the rate they used to, and new work is exactly what Justia is selling you.
Automattic headcount, 1,774 to 1,495
WordPress’s own parent company cut 16 percent of its staff. Revenue is still growing, they said, in a “highly competitive market.” Companies winning a market do not describe it that way on the day they let a sixth of the staff go.
Every technology gets a last decade. This is WordPress’s, and you are renting a seat on it at $97.49 a month.
Sources: W3Techs CMS usage, 2025 to 2026. HTTP Archive Web Almanac. Automattic company statements, April 2025.
One number settles it
Find out what your site scores today.
The audit takes about a minute and does not ask for an email. Then, if you want it, we rebuild what you have on a modern stack, on your domain, and hand you the keys.
Pricing figures are Justia’s published Elevate minimum and independent reviewer estimates for add-ons. Lighthouse ranges are from our audits of live Justia-hosted attorney sites. Vulnerability counts are from Patchstack’s State of WordPress Security 2024. Core Web Vitals pass rates are from the HTTP Archive Web Almanac.