{@cynic}justia
The injustice of Justia in the modern web
Justia and WordPress are the dinosaurs of the legal web. What worked before AI does not work now. We rebuild your site as a custom-coded website you own, and then we answer the phone.
We audited the websites of PIABA member firms. The ones on Justia scored the worst of any group.
Sources: php.net release history. WordPress.org. Justia published Elevate pricing. GoDaddy Managed WordPress renewal rates.
The two dinosaurs
If your site is on WordPress, or worse, Justia, you have no idea what it is costing you. WordPress gets slower every year: every plugin, every update, another weight on the scale. Justia is built on WordPress and charges you triple for the privilege. Both are costing you clients.
Slow by design. Built on a foundation from 2003. Every plugin you add is another brick in the wall between your site and a Google ranking. You pay for it every year, hosting, plugins, security patches, developer calls, and it never gets faster. It gets slower. WordPress is a dying platform and its days are numbered.
Justia is WordPress at triple the cost. They built their entire business on the same aging, bloated technology and then charged you a premium to sit on top of it. You are paying monthly for a platform that is slower every year, on infrastructure that was already obsolete when they sold it to you. AI has put the entire Justia business model at risk.
How old is old
Web technology turns over roughly every five years. Justia’s has not turned over once. The rest of the world went from templates to custom code. Your site is still a template.
PHP is written as a set of personal home page scripts. It is a good idea for 1995.
WordPress 0.7 ships as a blogging tool. The same year, Justia is founded by the man who built and sold FindLaw.
The theme and plugin economy takes over WordPress. Every feature becomes someone else’s code bolted onto a blog.
The industry moves to custom code and pre-built pages. Sites stop being assembled on a server for every visitor.
Google makes Core Web Vitals a ranking signal. Slow pages start losing positions to fast ones.
PHP is no longer a top-ten language in the TIOBE index. Nearly 8,000 new WordPress vulnerabilities are disclosed in a single year.
AI answers the investor’s first question before they ever call. A theme cannot do that. Justia is still selling the 2003 website, by the month, to attorneys who compete on Google.
Sources: TIOBE index, 2024. Patchstack, State of WordPress Security 2024. Google Search Central, page experience update, 2021.
The obituary
For twenty years the answer to “what should we build it on” was WordPress. That stopped being true, and the numbers show when. The platform is off its high, losing ground faster each quarter, and shedding staff at the company that owns it. You are paying by the month to stand on the downslope.
Down six periods straight
Share of the web, 43.6 percent to 41.5 percent
The first sustained decline in over a decade, and it is speeding up. WordPress gave up more ground in the five months after December 2025 than in the whole of 2025. Declines do not usually reverse once they accelerate.
Eight points off in two years
Share of newly built sites, 51 percent to 43 percent
Two years ago a slim majority of new sites were WordPress. Now it is a minority: 43 percent in the first quarter of 2026, down from 51. Nobody is choosing it for new work at the rate they used to, and new work is exactly what Justia is selling you.
279 people gone
Automattic headcount, 1,774 to 1,495
WordPress’s own parent company cut 16 percent of its staff. Revenue is still growing, they said, in a “highly competitive market.” Companies winning a market do not describe it that way on the day they let a sixth of the staff go.
The language underneath
Ask a developer under forty to build something new in PHP and watch the face. The modern web is written in TypeScript, built once, and served from a server near the visitor. PHP survives because of the installed base, not because anyone chooses it.
Developer surveys have ranked PHP among the most dreaded languages for a decade. The people who remain are maintaining legacy systems. That is who is on the other end of your support ticket.
PHP builds your page from scratch, on a server, every time someone visits. Database query, template, plugins, then ship. A modern site is built once and delivered instantly from a location near the visitor. One of these approaches is measurably faster. Google measures it.
7,966
New WordPress vulnerabilities disclosed in 2024, 96 percent of them in plugins. Your intake form, with an investor’s loss amount and broker name, runs through that code.
Every technology gets a last decade. This is WordPress’s, and you are renting a seat on it at $97.49 a month.
Sources: W3Techs CMS usage, 2025 to 2026. HTTP Archive Web Almanac. Patchstack, State of WordPress Security 2024. Automattic company statements, April 2025.
Locked in, both ways
Elevate is, in Justia’s words, “a customized WordPress platform.” Every one of their thousands of attorney sites is a WordPress install with a proprietary layer on top.
Moving off WordPress would mean rebuilding every client site at once, with 143 employees and a support operation in Saltillo, Mexico. So they do not. They add a chat widget and an AI writer that exports a Word document, and call it 2026.
The proprietary layer that keeps Justia on WordPress is the same layer that keeps you on Justia: no code access, no export, and they have declined requests to migrate clients to standard WordPress. Attorneys surveyed by rankings.io called it “effectively handcuffed.” You are locked to a company that is locked to a dying platform.
A SvelteKit site compiles to static files and runs on any edge network on earth. When the next thing comes, it moves.
The dinosaur is not the theme. It is the platform under it, and Justia is chained to it.
Sources: Justia marketing copy. Justia company headcount and Saltillo operations, independent reviews. Migration refusals and the “effectively handcuffed” quote: rankings.io survey of Justia attorneys.
The scores
Based on audits of live Justia-hosted attorney sites.
Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO
Justia gives every client a 100 on SEO and Accessibility. It is the participation trophy of web metrics, and Justia charges monthly to display it. Lead with Performance. That is the number Google ranks on.
Themes
On WordPress the look of your site is a theme: a layout someone else drew years ago, sold by the thousand. On Justia the theme is theirs, on their servers, behind a layer you cannot touch. It is an insult twice over.
One theme. Hundreds of firms. Find yours.
Wireframes of one Justia Elevate template, names changed. The gavel is always there.
To your readers
A prospect with a real problem lands on your site and is handed a layout they have already seen on a hundred other firms. The message is that you assumed they would not notice. They notice. They have been on the internet for twenty years and can spot a template before the hero image finishes loading. A theme tells the smartest client you will ever have that you thought they were stupid.
To your firm
Twenty years of practice, real verdicts, real credentials, a reputation built one case at a time, poured into a container designed for nobody and shared with everyone, with a stock gavel on top. Whatever makes your firm worth hiring is exactly what a theme is built to ignore, because a theme cannot know it. You are presented as a commodity by the vendor you pay to present you.
A modern law firm site is software. A theme is a brochure.
Templates
What a template is
What the template traps
The internet has moved past templates. They are predictable. They are lazy. Predictable, lazy, rented: pick a template, get all three.
No themes. No templates.
Justia picks a theme from a library and types your name in. We start with an empty folder and write a program for your firm: your practice, your cases, your city, your credentials, structured into pages that exist nowhere else on the internet.
What took an agency forty billable hours takes us an afternoon: crawl your old site, extract every word and image, rebuild it as code, generate the schema, the city pages, the redirect map. The result is not a template with your name in it. It is a website that has only ever existed for you.
Every rewritten page goes back to you as a redline before it ships. AI writes the first draft. You approve the last.
Themes were for when custom cost too much. It does not any more.
The age of AI
The site that wins the next decade asks the investor what happened, understands the answer, and routes the case before anyone picks up the phone. That takes real code, written for you. Justia’s answer to AI is an add-on that writes blog posts. For their domain.
An assistant on the page asks the investor about the broker, the product, the loss, and what happened, then qualifies the matter and hands your staff a summary. On WordPress this is a plugin from a stranger. On a custom-coded site it is built in.
Investors now ask search engines and AI assistants full questions. Sites that are fast, structured, and specific get cited. A slow template with generic schema gets skipped.
Spanish, Mandarin, Portuguese: fully translated pages at /es, /zh, /pt with correct hreflang tags, so Google indexes each language on its own. An investor who is more comfortable in Spanish finds you in Spanish. WordPress core still cannot do this in 2026; it is on their roadmap for 2027 or later, so until then it is a paid plugin that duplicates every page and slows the site, or a flag icon that Google cannot index. A custom-coded site does it properly.
A case-result calculator. A broker lookup. A client portal. Your FINRA record on the page. When the site is custom code you own, adding a capability is an afternoon, not a support ticket to Saltillo.
Ownership
The asset is owned
Code, content, domain, Cloudflare account: yours, permanently, whether or not you pay another dollar. Hosting on the free tier costs nothing.
The service is rented
A human, edits, monitoring, intake. Cancel and the site stays up exactly as it was. Cancel Justia and the site disappears.
Their invoice
Justia publishes exactly one price. Everything else is a sales call. Here is what a Justia site costs, using their own published minimum and the add-ons most firms end up buying.
a. The all-in tally, per month
| Justia Elevate, annual commitment, minimum | $82.50 |
| GoDaddy Managed WordPress, Basic, renewal rate | $14.99 |
| All in. About $1,170 a year, forever. | $97.49 |
| Owning your own site, Cloudflare free tier | $0 |
Deluxe hosting pushes it past $100 a month. Justia publishes exactly one price. Everything else is a sales call.
b. Sold separately
Real all-in cost once a typical attorney adds directory placement and basic services: $150 to $250 a month.
c. What you pay before Justia touches anything
Justia drops these pre-paid assets into a template and calls it a custom site. The design fee is real. It is just paid to someone else first.
d. The five-year model
| Headshot, logo, copywriting you supply before Justia touches anything | $1,000 to $5,000 |
| Justia Elevate, five years, at the published minimum | $4,950 |
| The WordPress server underneath it, five years, at GoDaddy’s renewal rate | $900 |
| Justia Elevate, five years, with typical add-ons | $9,000 to $15,000 |
| Rebuilding from zero when you leave, because you own nothing | $5,000 to $15,000 |
| Five-year cost of a site you will never own | $17,000 to $36,000 |
$0
Monthly hosting for a WPCynic build. A law firm’s traffic fits inside Cloudflare’s free tier. One build fee, then the code is yours.
Sources: Justia published Elevate pricing. GoDaddy Managed WordPress renewal rates. Independent reviewer estimates for add-ons. Agency rebuild quotes.
Our invoice
One build fee. Then a monthly for a human, if you want one. The site is yours either way.
$750 one time
Bar advertising rules are respected. Every rewritten page goes back to you as a redline before it ships.
$20 a month, optional
$0 included
No FindLaw. No lead-gen vendor. No per-lead fee. Intake is part of the site, not a subscription to someone else.
Care is included for the first three months of every rebuild.
An editor for your content, written for your site alone: $250, once. Never a WordPress plugin.
Anything else custom-coded, from a case calculator to a client portal: $100 an hour, quoted first. That is also how we replace the $2,000-a-month marketing services that exist to prop up WordPress.
How it works
We audit your live site and note the load time.
WPCynic rebuilds it, every page and post carried over, before we ever email you.
You get two links: your site, and your site rebuilt.
If you like it: redlines, the redirect map, Search Console, DNS. Nothing goes live until you say so.
You will not lose a single ranking. Every old URL is preserved or redirected, and we verify it in Search Console before cutover.
From the bar
Quote to come.
Quote to come.
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Why we care
For thirty years we have gone after bad stockbrokers on behalf of the investors they hurt. We go after bad web design and bad web services with the same zeal.
You know what a bucket shop is. One product, thousands of marks, a charge that arrives every month, and nothing the customer ever owns. A monthly fee for an asset that never becomes yours, sold to a professional who does not have time to read the fine print, by a company that profits from keeping it that way. Change the nouns and it is the same case we have been building since 1993.
Antique code. Modern invoice.
Justia. Injustice.
Start here
Two links come back: your site, and your site rebuilt. Two numbers: your load time, and ours. No call, no deck, no commitment.