Everything was going great on our community website where I write blog posts. It is a Wordpress site that automatically sent out social media updates and emails each time a blog post was published. We have thousands of readers and generate bushels of comments. Then one day I logged in and discovered that all our connections to Facebook, Twitter, Jetpack site statistics, email updates, author bios, and our calendar had stopped working. I was shocked.

It turned out that one of the contributors -- we don't know who -- had clicked on the "Update Wordpress Now" link on the admin page. That update blew away all of our customization, plug-ins and add-ons that we had painstakingly built over months. We are now paying a web developer a fortune to fix the disabled site.

I am exasperated with Wordpress. But meanwhile, my LawLytics blog (which you are reading) has worked smoothly and consistently for years, without me having click on any updates. There are 8 really good reasons why you should switch away from Wordpress and use LawLytics instead. 

1. LawLytics doesn't require manual updates.

WordPress is constantly updating its core software code. Sometimes the updates are to add or improve features, but often they are done to fix bugs and security issues. When you update your core WordPress software, you may have plugins that stop working entirely, break parts of your website, make your website look bad, or cause serious security issues. Again, you might not know that the security issues are there until it's too late. For attorneys, WordPress can be a game of trust and chance.

Solution: LawLytics comes with all the features attorneys need already built in. LawLytics does not require plugins because everything that attorneys need to have a thriving website is built in. When we add or update features, or enhance security, your LawLytics website gets the updates instantly. There's never any effort required on your part, never any independent developers to rely on, and never concerns about parts of your website lagging or breaking.

2. Wordpress has hidden costs for law firms.

Companies that use WordPress on a high level make substantial investments in code development, security, expensive servers, or high-end hosting (in the tens-of-thousands a month), maintenance, and design.

LawLytics is built for lawyers to avoid the frustration of the hidden costs of using “free” general-purpose, open-source website software like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and others. Everything you need to have a successful website (and to scale it as big as you want in terms of both size and traffic) is built into our predictable monthly fee.

3. WordPress has security issues.

With Wordpress, attorneys need to worry more about bugs, malware, hacking, sabotage, link hijacking, and many other things that can ruin your web presence, your business, your reputation, and potentially expose you to ethics inquiries. The problem is that you may not know who developed the plugin, how secure it is, and how it's going to behave. It's easy to misconfigure a forms plugin, and it's easy for plugins to break or become reconfigured during software updates.

Solution: LawLytics has built-in security safeguards. LawLytics is a closed system. This means that we have the ability to engineer and regulate our own security. We only allow attorneys and related professionals to join, and nobody outside of LawLytics has access to our codebase or database.

We regularly fix compromised WordPress law firm websites by bringing them into the LawLytics system. Often, these sites were hosted in a shared environment with web hosting companies that were supposed to be monitoring for hacking and malware but failed to notice serious breaches for months.

Click to discover the 5 other marketing risks posed by Wordpress:

4. Wordpress is a general-purpose platform and is not built for law firms.

5. Wordpress is not natively SEO-friendly.

6. Wordpress has a steep learning curve for lawyers.

7. WordPress websites load slowly or load unpredictably.

8. The WordPress menu system is frustrating for lawyers.

"The internet is a dangerous place," says Lawlytics CEO Dan Jaffe. "However, as a lawyer, you have an obligation to safeguard against known dangers and liabilities. You don't want to discover that your website has been hacked and riddled with links to unrelated sites (we've seen that on WordPress sites), that your phone number on your website has been changed to a number that forwards to your competitor's office (we've seen that on WordPress sites), or that your potential client forms are now being sent to a competitor (we've seen it) or published on your blog (we've heard of it happening).