New Study: Almost Every New York Injury Firm Fails Google's Speed Test

What we measured

Core Web Vitals are Google's three field metrics for how a page actually behaves for a visitor: how long the largest piece of content takes to appear (LCP), how much the layout jumps while loading (CLS), and how long the page ignores input while it works (INP, approximated in lab data by total blocking time). Google's own thresholds are LCP at or under 2.5 seconds, CLS at or under 0.1, and blocking time at or under 200 milliseconds. A page passes only if all three clear.

We measured each firm's home page through the PageSpeed Insights API on mobile. Where a site has enough real-user traffic the result includes field data; otherwise it is lab only, which is weaker evidence, and we record which one a measurement came from.

The results

69 of the 71 firms in the directory could be measured. 4 passed. The median performance score was 62.

The spread is wide. Fromen Injury Law PLLC scores 98, while Lipsitz, Ponterio & Comerford, LLC scores 10. These are firms competing for the same clients on the same search terms.

Two other things turned up while we were looking.

4 firms publish no structured data at all, not a line of JSON-LD. That costs a point, and it makes the site harder for search engines and AI assistants to read.

And 10 of these 71 firms name no attorney at all on a page we could read. A roster is the input every other check needs, which is why we match the 805 names the rest of them do publish against the state register ourselves: 580 of those resolve to a registration. We ran that exercise across the whole directory, and New York is the only market here where the register answers us at all.

Why the score counts it

Website performance sits in pillar D of the LFL Certification Score, worth 25 of 100, and Core Web Vitals is the first thing in it.

The reasoning is not that a fast site makes a better lawyer. It is that a firm which maintains its own site is a firm that is reachable, current and accountable. It is the same reason the pillar rewards published fee terms, attorney credentials and a working contact method.

Pillar D is also deliberately capped. It can lift a firm's tier but it cannot create one: certification requires professional standing, verified outcomes and client experience to reach 40 of their combined 65.

A firm with an excellent website and thin verified results plateaus, by design. The full methodology sets out every sub-factor and the evidence behind it.

One caveat applies to every figure above. A site we could not measure keeps its sub-factor pending rather than scoring zero, which takes those points out of the denominator, so a firm's total is a share of what we read rather than of a hundred. We measured how far that moves a score, and it moves it further than any state line does.

What a firm can do

Of everything the score measures, this is the part a firm controls outright, and it changes in weeks rather than years.

Compressing hero images, deferring third-party scripts and serving fonts locally will move all three metrics. Chat widgets and tag managers are the usual culprits behind a long blocking time.

Publishing bar admission numbers on attorney bios is a text change.

Every firm can see its own sub-scores and the evidence behind each one on its profile. If a measurement looks wrong, the profile links to the source we used.

Measurements come from the Google PageSpeed Insights API. A site we cannot measure keeps that sub-factor pending rather than receiving an estimated score.