Cordell & Cordell: A Custom WordPress Rebuild for a 100-Office National Law Firm

Client: Cordell & Cordell
Industry: Legal, Family Law
Timeline: Launched December 2021
Services: Custom WordPress Development, Page Builder Replacement, Performance Optimization, Technical SEO

The Challenge

Cordell & Cordell is one of the largest family law firms in the country. Founded in 1990 and headquartered in St. Louis, the firm has grown to more than 100 offices across 30+ states and the United Kingdom, with hundreds of attorneys focused on representing men in divorce and custody matters. A firm at that scale runs its website as a lead engine: office-level location pages, attorney profiles, a large content library, and appointment scheduling all live on one WordPress install that has to perform in dozens of local markets at once.

By 2021 the site was carrying the weight of years of additions. It ran on a Genesis child theme with Elementor layered on top, plus slider, notification, and booking plugins, with nine plugins loading on the homepage and more than 80 script tags on a single page load. Each layer had been a reasonable decision on its own. Together they produced a site that was slow to load, awkward to update, and difficult to keep consistent across a hundred office pages.

The Approach

  • A fully custom WordPress theme replaced the Genesis and Elementor stack. Templates for offices, attorneys, practice areas, and resources were built directly in code, so the page builder and the slider plugins that supported it were retired entirely.
  • Location architecture designed for 100+ offices. Office and attorney data were structured so that every local page follows the same template and carries consistent, complete information, which is also what local search rewards.
  • Integrations kept, overhead removed. Appointment booking, forms, and social feeds that the firm relied on were preserved, while presentation-layer plugins were replaced with theme code. The homepage plugin count dropped from nine at the start of the project to seven at launch and to four within two years as the remaining pieces were consolidated.
  • Performance and technical SEO built in: lean markup, page caching, and clean heading and schema structure across a site with thousands of URLs.

The Results

The rebuilt cordellcordell.com launched in December 2021 and served as the firm’s primary marketing platform for roughly two and a half years, through continued office expansion, before the firm moved to a new design in 2024. Semrush estimates put the site at about 108,900 monthly organic visits in November 2021, the month before launch, and 141,600 in December 2022, a 30% increase in the first full year on the new build, with the site holding above 130,000 estimated monthly visits for most of that year. Comparing archived copies of the homepage, the custom theme eliminated the page builder and slider dependencies and steadily reduced the plugin load, from nine before the project to four by 2024, while keeping the booking and forms integrations the firm’s intake process depended on.

For a firm operating in dozens of metro markets, the practical outcome was a site where a hundred office pages could be updated consistently from one set of templates, without a page builder in the way.

Key Takeaways

Multi-location sites need architecture, not more plugins. When every office page follows a structured template, consistency and local search visibility both improve, and updates stop being a page-by-page job.

Replacing a page builder is a performance project. Retiring Elementor and its supporting plugins removed a layer of scripts and styles from every page load on the site.

Keep what the business runs on. A rebuild does not have to throw out the integrations a firm depends on. The goal is to remove overhead from the presentation layer while preserving the tools behind intake and scheduling.

Related

This project is one of the examples in our guide to law firm web design, which covers what we build for firms, the problems we find most often in legal websites, and answers to the questions we hear from firms on discovery calls.