Disclaimer: Below are observations, facts, and opinions. This article is not meant to sway anyone one way or the other- these are just important differences between Justia and WordPress. In my line of work, I use both sites daily.
Justia offers up websites for personal injury lawyers, but, how do they stack up against WordPress websites?
First looks
As someone who spends all day in WordPress, when I first logged in to a Justia website, I felt like I had gone through a time warp, and not into the future. The Justia CMS sort of feels like I’m in 2003. If you have a Justia site now and you hate change, Justia may be a good fir for you.
Blogging
Creating content on a consistent basis is a vital part of SEO. In fact, I have personal injury clients who get cases via unique content and don’t even utilize SEO.
Justia sites do not have an internal blogging feature. This is a deal breaker for me. For those willing to live with their blog on a subdomain or additional domain Justia will configure an off site blog for you. This indeed can compliment your existing domain (to an extent). But, if you have a powerful domain it would be great to have all of your content on that powerful domain so that it performs better in search.
WordPress websites automatically ping search engines when new content is added, and it shows up in search in anywhere from 30 min – 4 days depending on how authoritative Google deems your site. Justia’s platform does not do this.
Adding new pages
Adding a page to Justia is a very time consuming process. The formatting has to be just right unlike modern platforms. You must use a text editor and make sure to strip out any unnecessary code that programs like Microsoft Word may add.
In WordPress you can usually just paste in your content and hit publish. Sometimes the process takes under 5 seconds.
In Justia you must get the content just right, save the page, rebuilt the page, and publish the page. Formatting a page correctly sometimes takes me up to 15 minutes, then, when I do publish a page, I have experienced wait times as long as 7 MORE minutes.
A screenshot of the Justia CMS (aka Site Builder).
Hosting
If you have someone managing your site they should be able to keep WordPress patched, updated, and backed up. Attorneys capable of handling this on their own can get hosting for as little as $1/mo.
Justia has this all taken care of for you as well.
SEO
These days SEO for personal injury attorneys is all about user experience, great content, and inbound links.
Less important are some of the on-site intricacies, although they are still definitely a factor. If you want to be able to easily resize images, add alt tags, control URLs, etc (the list is rather long) then you need WordPress.
With WordPress, you can easily blog about events in your city and be creative, hopefully attracting natural inbound links to the resources which you have created. With Justia, you can do this, but you will be limited to adding the content to a page or an off-site blog.
Other
WordPress is constantly evolving. If you want to embed an Instagram image or a tweet- no problem. Insert this content in to a Justia site and the page will die.
There are limits in Justia such as directory depth and content length. I once added a 15 page long page to Justia and a day later it disappeared. The system randomly kills pages which are “too long”. WordPress does not have these limitations.
Conclusion
If you want exposure in search, full control, plan on developing new content on a regular basis, need to embed scripts, change things on the fly, etc., want custom HTML and CSS, or simply a powerful, scalable website WordPress is for you. In fact, WordPress powers over 20% of the Internet.
If you just need a website and do not plan on frequently updating it often Justia is perfectly fine, maintenance free option.
Leave a Reply