The Ultimate Guide to Law Firm Web Hosting: Speed & Security Overview

Importance of Both Speed and Security on Your Site

Website hosting encompasses many of the services that go into making individuals’ and organizations’ websites accessible to users on the internet. In order for your site to be accessible to users, it first needs to be hosted on a server. This means that all of the files, images, code, and more that make up the website need to be stored on a special kind of computer called a server. Servers are always connected to the internet and are always running to ensure there is no downtime, so the website is accessible at all times. Hosting providers take care of managing and maintaining these servers to keep sites running at their optimal speed and performing their best. Website hosting involves maintaining and updating the sites themselves on the server to ensure both site and server security are not compromised.

While hosting involves keeping a site up and running, ensuring it is accessible to users on the internet requires a few other steps that are not covered by hosting. Purchasing and maintaining ownership of a domain, creating and applying DNS records, and name servers are all required to ensure users can connect to your site at the address desired. Without all of these, a site can be hosted on a server but remain inaccessible to the general public.

Why is Website Hosting Important for My Law Firm?

Having a reliable and fast hosting partner is vital for any law firm that wants a successful, well-performing website that generates inquiries and leads for the firm. Any downtime on a site is a time when your site is completely inaccessible, meaning that there is no possibility of generating new business from your site. A fast and reliable web host would both minimize the potential for downtime and, if a site does go down, would quickly and reliably restore the site to working condition. Choosing an experienced hosting partner ensures that downtime is minimal and any site issues are resolved efficiently with minimal loss of data and time. We at PaperStreet have over 20 years of hosting experience hosting over 1000 sites.

Why Does Page Speed Matter for My Website?

Pagespeed is incredibly important with regard to how well your site performs in both a marketing and technical sense. In terms of marketing, if a site loads slowly or generally performs poorly, users will not want to stay on your site and will leave for another site. This directly leads to the loss of a potential lead. Not only does a poorly performing site turn away potential leads, but it can also lead to your site not being listed highly by Google and other search engines. Page speed is one of the defining factors of how highly Google ranks your site. The better your site ranks, the higher Google will list your site’s pages in searches when relevant, and the higher your page is on Google search results, the more likely your site will be seen by potential clients.

On the technical side, the effects of a poorly performing site are more directly visible. The site will load slowly, which leads to users leaving the site, as mentioned earlier. On top of this, poor page speed can lead to a variety of different issues across the site. Poor loading time can cause issues with the site requesting resources from the server. If a page takes too long to load, it may simply error out and stop loading the page. Furthermore, scripts and functions on the site may not behave as intended if they aren’t loaded in time, causing potential issues with tracking and forms. For these reasons, it’s important to ensure that your site is running fast.

What is Slowing Down My Website?

There are a wide variety of issues that can slow down a website, so let’s cover the most common ones we encounter when maintaining sites we host. The most common issue is unoptimized images hampering page load times. Images that are natively larger than they are displayed take up more data than needed and should be resized to save on data that needs to be loaded. Similarly, the images should also be compressed to further save on data that needs to be loaded. Lastly, images should also be converted to more optimal formats in order to further save data. The most optimized format that is widely supported on modern browsers is WebP, while JPG is the most optimal format on all browsers (including legacy browsers such as Internet Explorer).

The second most common issue is improperly managed plugins being used on the site. This is most often caused by plugins not being kept up to date, which can severely impact site speeds. Another common issue is simply having too many plugins running concurrently. Having as few plugins as possible can lead to improved performance on your site.

Another common issue is external code calls running on the site. External calls require the site to connect to an external server, request the resource, and then load it on the site, which all takes additional loading time. It’s important to make sure you only run what’s strictly necessary on the site in order to preserve performance. At PaperStreet, we ensure that your site’s images are properly optimized, plugins are up to date, and that no poorly configured external calls are running on the site.

Why is Maintaining My Website Security Important?

Like any device or software, it’s imperative to ensure that your website is secure for several different reasons. The most important reason to maintain your site’s security is the defense of important and/or private data submitted to your site. There are several different types of data that need to be protected on a website. The most common kind of information submitted to sites is personal identification data, which includes a person’s name, address, date of birth, and contact information. Financial information such as credit card numbers, bank account details, budgets and assets, income and salary details, and other payment information are often submitted to legal sites when dealing with potential cases.

Some types of leads, such as Personal Injury or Employment, may require some sensitive information to be submitted to evaluate a case, such as health and injury information or employment history. On top of all of this, the site owner’s own information needs to be protected as well. This kind of information includes connection data such as IP addresses and login information. On top of running the risk of compromising client data, there are several penalties, fines, and other legal repercussions associated with not properly securing sensitive data, so it is incredibly important to ensure your site’s data is secure.

On top of protecting data stored on your site, site security is important to prevent many different types of attacks on your site. These different types of attacks can include:

• Brute Force Attacks: The most common kind of attack on a website. This type of attack involves a malicious agent, be it a bot or human, repeatedly attempting to guess usernames and passwords to gain entry to a site.
• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: This type of attack involves overwhelming a website with a flood of web traffic from multiple sources. This can prevent legitimate users from accessing the site and/or prevent the site’s functions from occurring as its resources are overloaded.
• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks: This type of attack involves injecting malicious scripts into pages on a site. These scripts are often used to attempt to steal browser information, such as cookies and session tokens.
• SQL Injection (SQLi) Attacks: This type of attack involves injecting malicious SQL queries into input fields on a site to manipulate database entries. This can result in data being manipulated on the site, which can result in compromised logins and other issues across the site.
• Malware Injection: This type of attack involves injecting malicious code into a site to exploit vulnerabilities. Common effects of this kind of attack are siphoning data to a third-party server, redirecting users viewing a page to an external source, or injecting ads/malicious content onto a site.

An insecure site can also lead to a loss in performance, which directly impacts the SEO of your site. One of the most important and impactful metrics that determine a site’s rankings on Google is its performance. Having your site run fast and efficiently is critical to ranking high on Google. Many of the attacks mentioned above directly hamper your site’s performance, which in turn lowers your site’s SEO scores. Attacks such as DDoS can completely bring down a site, critically harming a site’s SEO. Other attacks that detract from the user experience or slow the site’s load times also harm SEO.

Finally, an insecure site can also lead to the loss of client trust, which is much harder to regain than SEO. If your site has a data breach, a majority of people who know of the breach will simply not trust their data on your site or, even worse, not trust their data with your firm. As can be seen with several data breaches with major corporations, loss of client trust after a breach is immediate and crippling in the long term, depending on the severity of the breach. With this in mind, it is important to maintain the security of your site along with any and all software in use.

The 25% Hosting & 75% Support Rule

An important part of choosing the correct web host for your site is selecting a vendor that not only hosts your site but maintains it as well. Many cheaper hosts will host your site for a low fee, but these cheap web hosts will not maintain your site. Typically, with these hosts, the responsibility of keeping your site up to date and running is on you, while they take responsibility for keeping the server you host the site on active. If your site goes down, you may not even be notified that there is an issue with the site unless you or a user on your site notices there is an issue and notifies you directly. At Paperstreet, we follow a 25% hosting and 75% support rule when it comes to hosting. A quarter of the monthly hosting fee you pay is for the actual hosting of the site, while the remaining three-quarters cover our maintenance and support of your site. This maintenance includes the following:

• 24/7 Support From Our Team
• Plugin Updates
• WordPress^® Updates
• Daily Security Scans
• Monitoring Logins
• Monitoring Bot Activity
• Monitoring Site Traffic
• Backups Every 24 Hours
• Emergency Backups
• Server Maintenance
• System Restores

All of these services are provided to ensure that your site has minimal to no downtime and is always both up-to-date and secure.

Features of Hosting with PaperStreet

Not only does hosting with PaperStreet come with all of the support and maintenance listed above, but it also comes with additional perks and functionality that we provide clients hosting with us. To start, your site is hosted on a dedicated server that is exclusive to our clients. Other web hosts host their sites on shared servers that accommodate thousands of sites. On these types of servers, your site could be vulnerable to ‘noisy neighbor’ issues that result from other poor-performing or resource-intensive sites on the same server. Sites on our servers also benefit from the availability of staging environments so changes can be made on a copy of your site so any work does not negatively affect the live site. Our servers also provide SSL certificates for your site at no extra cost to you to further ensure your site’s security. On the topic of security, hosting your site with PaperStreet also comes with Cloudflare A record routing and Wordfence monitoring to further improve the security of your site.

In addition to these additional features, we also provide the following software for free when you host your site on our servers:

• SMTP – Sendgrid Pro ($89.95 monthly benefit)
• Gravity Forms Elite License ($259 yearly benefit)
• Advanced Custom Fields Pro ($49 yearly benefit)

In total, we provide $1380 worth of software annually to host your site on our servers.

How to Improve Your Site’s Speed/Performance

Improving your site’s speed and performance can be a daunting task. There are several different elements of the site that need to be examined, optimized, and improved in order to ensure optimal performance. Not all of these tasks are difficult, however, and the first steps toward improving your site can be as easy as clicking a button!

Ensuring your site’s Core Components Are Up-to-Date

The first thing that should be done on a site is to ensure its core components are up to date. This includes your site’s WordPress^® core and theme on the latest version in order to be running the most optimized code. Additionally, plugins should be updated as newer versions will often optimize the performance and security issues of previous versions. Lastly, the site’s PHP version should be up to date. Updating a site’s PHP version can cause a lot of errors if the site is running old code, so a backup should be made prior to this taking effect.

Utilize a Performance Optimization Plugin

There are many performance-enhancing plugins that provide a variety of tools and services to improve the performance of your site. Two that we use often here at Paperstreet are Autoptimize and WP Rocket, both of which we have found to consistently improve site performance by up to 25% or more. One important thing to note is that after installing and configuring either of these plugins, the site should be reviewed to ensure that no functionality has been disrupted, as both of these plugins will change how JavaScript and other files are called on the site.

Compress Your Images and Utilize More Efficient File Formats

One of the simplest ways to improve load times on a site is to reduce the amount of data that has to be loaded when a page is opened. The most common way to do this is by compressing images on the page or converting them to a more optimal file type. The current most efficient, widely supported image format for websites is WebP. There are many conversion tools out there that can quickly convert images either individually, such as Compress or Die, or in bulk, such as CloudConvert. Additionally, if there is a large amount of uncompressed images on your site, you may want to install an image compression plugin. One such plugin we have had good results from is Smush.

Run Performance Reports to Pinpoint Issues on Your Site

If you want detailed listings on what is affecting performance on your site, there are two free tools you can use to find out what these issues are and how to resolve them:

• Pagespeed Insights: Pagespeed Insights is a website run by Google that presents simple and streamlined information on your site’s performance. An additional upside of this tool is that you can see what in particular is harming your site’s performance on Google, as this tool measures the metrics that Google’s algorithm uses to determine how your site ranks on searches.
• GTMetrix Report: GTMetrix provides another tool that displays issues with performance on your site. GTMetrix provides more detailed information than Pagespeed Insights and can even display a waterfall chart of how particular elements of the site are loaded, which can be useful for determining what may be slowing down your site’s load times.

Have an Experienced SEO and Web Development Team Audit Your Site

The best possible option for improving your site’s performance is hiring an experienced team to analyze and resolve issues related to site performance. We at PaperStreet have audited and improved the performance of hundreds of sites and have even brought sites with a 0 on Pagespeed Insights to the high 90s.

How to Improve Your Site’s Security

The security of your site is absolutely critical. Both you and your clients want to be safe in the knowledge that your site and its data are secure, but how do you achieve this? Oftentimes, the most reliable security practices are the simplest and go hand in hand with a well-performing website.

Keeping Your WordPress^® Core Up-to-Date

WordPress^® releases new updates often in order to address security and performance issues with their major releases and are often on top of newly discovered flaws in their code.

Ensuring Your PHP Is Up-To-Date

Running outdated PHP exposes your site to known vulnerabilities that were found in older versions, making it a target for hackers that can exploit these vulnerabilities. If you are looking into options for hosting your site, be sure to choose a site host that provides the option to run the latest version of PHP. Many cheaper web host options do not provide the ability to run PHP 8.0 and forward, which presents a large security risk for your site.

Have a Reliable Web Host

For your site’s security, you want to ensure that the host of your site keeps consistent backups in the event you need to revert your site to an older version. Furthermore, you’ll want a host that also monitors your site’s security and reports any issues back to you. At PaperStreet, we keep two months’ worth of daily backups of the sites we host and actively monitor sites’ security in order to keep them secure.

Keeping Plugins, Themes, and Other Third Party Code Up-to-Date

As you, the site admin, are not the creator of this code, you don’t have direct control or knowledge of the inner workings of the third-party code. This can often lead to bugs or vulnerabilities that are not known to you being present on your site. Vulnerabilities are found and outlined weekly and can range from minor exploits only an admin-authenticated user could perform to major exploits that can be achieved by any user visiting the site, such as code injections or tampering with the database. Due to this, it’s imperative you keep any and all third-party code on the site up-to-date.

Obfuscate Your Login URL

One of the most common forms of attacks on sites is brute force attacks, where an external agent, either human or a bot, attempts to brute-force a login to a website. One very simple solution to this issue is to change the URL that provides the login to the backend of your site. This will cut back on the amount of bots and unauthorized users trying to access the site as the login URL is no longer clear.

Utilize Security Plugins on Your Site

Lastly, the use of security plugins can help catch and monitor security issues and enable stricter firewalls to keep your site safe. Three good options for WordPress^® security plugins include:

• Sucuri
• Wordfence
• Solid Security

All three of these provide security monitoring of your site to help track and prevent security issues on the site before something happens.