We measured 24 law firms websites in Ghana. 75% fail the most basic check.
18 of 24 do not have a single, clear H1. 15 have no structured data at all, so nothing on them can appear as a rich result. Median time to first byte is 1.2 seconds. Every number below comes from our audit engine, and the method is stated before the findings.
- Sites sampled
- 24
- Could be measured
- 24
- Median first byte
- 1.2s
- Median audit score
- 70
Firms listed in the Legal 500 Ghana directory, the YEN.com.gh list of law firms in Ghana, the AttorneysHouse Accra directory, and firms named in Chambers Global's Ghana ranking, where a working website could be found. Directories, bar association pages and firms without a site of their own were excluded. This is a sample of the firms a searcher finds, not a random sample of the profession.
Each site was fetched once by an identified crawler that obeys robots.txt, and its homepage, robots.txt and sitemap were measured by the same engine that powers our free audit. All 24 could be measured. Every percentage is over the 24 measurable sites. No site is named.
Eight checks, none of which need a budget to pass.
18 of 24 do not have exactly one H1. 7 have no meta description and 8 no canonical tag. These are the cheapest signals a page can send about what it is, and most sites are not sending them.
8 have no XML sitemap and 6 no robots.txt. 15 carry no structured data, and only 9 declare the organisation in schema, so 15 are anonymous to an answer engine.
15 take over a second to return their first byte and 1 over three. 10 have no share image, so every link posted to WhatsApp or LinkedIn arrives as a blank card. Median page is 136KB of HTML carrying 581 words.
The bar is low, which is the opportunity.
None of the eight checks costs money to pass. They are the difference between a site that was built and a site that was built properly, and in this sample the properly built ones are the minority. A law firm that fixes the basics starts ahead of most of its market on the day it launches.
We wrote out what a website for law firms in Ghana actually has to do, and what it costs, at websites for law firms. Or run your own site through the free audit and compare it to these numbers directly.
About the method.
How were the 24 law firms chosen?
Firms listed in the Legal 500 Ghana directory, the YEN.com.gh list of law firms in Ghana, the AttorneysHouse Accra directory, and firms named in Chambers Global's Ghana ranking, where a working website could be found. Directories, bar association pages and firms without a site of their own were excluded. This is a sample of the firms a searcher finds, not a random sample of the profession.
Why are percentages over measurable sites rather than all sampled?
0 of 24 could not be measured: 0 refused the request or returned an error and 0 served a bot protection page instead of the site. Reporting a site as failing a check we could not run would be dishonest, so every percentage is over the 24 that could be read.
Are the response times reliable?
Each is time to first byte from one location on one attempt, including DNS, TLS and redirects. It is not a lab benchmark and a second run would move individual numbers. The distribution is stable enough to say how many sites are slow, which is the claim being made.
Why are no companies named?
The study reports distributions, not a league table. Naming businesses for technical faults would be a cheap way to get attention and an expensive way to lose an industry's goodwill, and some flags are measurement artefacts rather than faults.
Can I check my own site against this?
Yes. The free audit on this site is the same engine that produced these numbers, so the result is directly comparable.
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