SRA website compliance: what your firm's site actually has to show
The SRA Transparency Rules have applied to every SRA-regulated firm's website since December 2018. The requirements are specific, published, and checkable — which is exactly why the SRA checks them with proactive web sweeps.
Sources last verified: 2026-08-12.1 — official SRA links are cited in each section.
The three things the rules require of your website
Rule 1 — price information
If your firm offers any of the specified services (residential conveyancing, uncontested probate, immigration applications, unfair or wrongful dismissal claims, summary motoring offences, business debt recovery up to £100,000, or licensing applications for business premises), your website must publish the total cost — or an average or range — together with the basis for charges, VAT treatment, likely disbursements, key stages and timescales, and who carries out the work.
Official source: SRA — Transparency in price and service guidance
Rule 2 — complaints information
A firm with a website must publish its complaints procedure, and explain how and when a complaint can be made to the Legal Ombudsman and to the SRA. A contact page that says “speak to your solicitor if unhappy” does not meet this on its own.
Official source: SRA Transparency Rules — Rule 2
Rule 4.1 — regulatory information
The website must display the firm's SRA number and the SRA digital badge — the official clickable logo, embedded so it links through to the SRA's record for your firm. A screenshot of the logo, or a badge left off after a redesign, is a common failure.
Official source: SRA — Clickable logo / digital badge
Rule 3 additionally requires that published information is clear, accessible and in a prominent place — pricing buried in a PDF two clicks deep can fail even when the numbers are right. For the full requirement-by-requirement breakdown, use the Transparency Rules checklist.
Why firms that were fine at launch stop being fine
Most firms got their website right once — usually when the rules came in, or at the last redesign. The problem is that a website is not a document; it changes. In our experience the drift is rarely deliberate:
- A redesign or theme update rebuilds the footer, and the SRA badge embed or the SRA number quietly disappears.
- A pricing page is rewritten by the marketing team and the VAT wording, disbursements table or timescales are trimmed for “readability”.
- The complaints page is migrated and the Legal Ombudsman section — or the link to the page itself — breaks.
- A new practice-area page is added for a specified service without the price information Rule 1 requires for it.
The SRA's own evidence supports this: its 2021 sampling suggested up to two-thirds of firms declaring compliance were not fully compliant when their sites were actually checked (sra.org.uk). Nobody in those firms decided to stop complying. Their websites changed and nobody was watching.
How automated monitoring works
FirmProof crawls your firm's public pages every week and runs automated monitoring checks against the published requirements: is the SRA number present, does the digital badge render and link correctly, is a complaints procedure discoverable, does it cover the Legal Ombudsman and the SRA, is VAT treatment stated on price pages. Every finding shows the exact page, the excerpt it was judged on, and the SRA source it was tested against.
Results are honest by design: Action needed, Review needed (where a human judgement call is required), or Clear — which means “no issue detected by this check”, not a certificate of compliance. When something that previously passed disappears after a site edit, you hear about it that week, and every scan lands in a dated evidence history your COLP can point to.
See where your site stands today
The free scan runs three of the checks — SRA number, digital badge, complaints information — against your live site in about a minute. No account, public pages only, nothing stored.
Run the free 3-check scan