Law Firm Website Cyber Security in the UK: A 2026 Practical Guide

Solicitor firms handle high value transactions, personal data, and confidential correspondence. That combination attracts attackers who care less about defacing your site and more about intercepting communications, seeding phishing pages, or planting redirects to fake completion statement portals.

In practice most incidents start at the website login, at a stale plugin, or at a compromised staff email that also holds the WordPress password.

• SSL certificate and forced HTTPS across every page.
• Two factor authentication on every WordPress admin account.
• Least privilege user roles (fee earners rarely need admin).
• A real web application firewall, not a plugin toggle.
• Malware scanning with alerting, not silent logs.
• Encrypted offsite backups with quarterly restore drills.
• An incident response playbook that names the 72 hour ICO clock.

Every enquiry form submission on a solicitor site is personal data and often special category data (health, criminal offences, family status). Store submissions in a database with access controls, not an inbox that half the team can search.

• TLS on the form submission endpoint (yes, still worth verifying).
• Retention policy that deletes stale enquiries.
• Access log that shows who read a submission.

Turn on two factor authentication for every WordPress admin user, today. Not by memo, actually enforce it at the login screen. Most law firm site breaches we clean up would have been prevented by this one change.

On our care plan for UK law firms we enforce two factor authentication, run staging tested updates, monitor for malware and file changes, keep offsite encrypted backups, and run a documented restore drill every quarter. The incident response playbook is in the client folder with the 72 hour ICO reporting steps ready to go.