LegalShield frees up engineers and launches a 12-point conversion win with Webflow

Most people don't plan for legal or identity issues, but smart ones prepare before something happens. LegalShield offers help through LegalShield and IDShield, providing affordable legal guidance and identity services to 4.5 million individuals across the U.S. and Canada — whether they're planning ahead or need immediate support. But their website wasn't built to support the kind of urgency or trust their mission promised.

It explained the products, but didn’t guide users through the real-life problems they were trying to solve. It wasn’t tailored to different regions or languages. And it couldn’t support the kind of testing, iteration, and speed the team needed to meet evolving customer expectations. 

As LegalShield shifted toward more customer-centered digital experiences, they knew the website had to become more than a brochure. It had to function as a conversion tool, a communications platform, and a system that empowered every team to move faster. “Ultimately, we want users to have an exceptional experience from start to finish,” said Woody Whitman, LegalShield’s VP of Engineering. “To do that, we need to meet people’s needs, deliver answers fast, and stay in sync with how they search today.”

Rebuilding the web stack to empower marketers and engineers

Great storytelling happens when content and design work seamlessly together. Webflow gives us the creative freedom to match our visual narrative with our messaging — whether that's simplifying complex legal concepts or helping someone understand how we can help during a legal matter. We can now design experiences that truly reflect our brand story.

- Bob Toevs, Chief Communications Officer and VP of Story & Design, LegalShield

LegalShield’s marketing site was originally built on a mix of Drupal, HubSpot, and WordPress. These platforms relied heavily on plugins and constant maintenance. Publishing updates was slow, and marketing depended on engineers for even small changes.

“Any time marketing or sales needed something new, it meant upgrading a plugin, writing custom code, or deploying changes just to enable basic functionality,” said Woody. “It was a frustrating process. By the time we implemented a feature, the requirements had already shifted.”

Engineering was stuck in front-end tasks that pulled focus from strategic initiatives. “I didn’t want any engineers harmed in the making of our website,” said Woody. Meanwhile, content and product teams couldn’t move independently, slowing experimentation and limiting the company’s ability to adapt. “The goal was to get 50% of my engineering budget off of the marketing sites.”

As LegalShield prioritized initiatives like Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and their broader vision for a seamless customer experience, the cracks in their tech stack became more obvious. They needed a more flexible, scalable platform to support fast experimentation and delivery. 

With Webflow, non-technical teams can now build and publish independently, allowing engineers to focus on product development, experimentation frameworks, and personalization.

“By not having to build our own CMS, shopping cart, or authentication system, we’re freeing engineers to prioritize the highest-impact dev work. That’s the biggest win.” Content updates that once took 4–6 weeks now ship in as little as 4–6 days.

Webflow also integrates with LegalShield’s existing tools, including Figma and Relume, streamlining migration and maintaining design consistency. Page branching helps avoid publishing conflicts, and reusable components accelerate speed to market for new pages. “Branching has been incredibly useful — it lets us isolate longer-term changes, like page restructuring, from quick content edits,” said Woody. 

"Real-time collaboration might be the biggest unlock I've seen in Webflow in years. Being able to have multiple teammates designing and editing together will probably save us 40-50% of our time, meaning we can launch faster and tackle more high priority work as a team,” says Russell Kostner, Head of Design at LegalShield.

Throughout the migration, Webflow’s Account Team acted as a strategic partner. “Our Account team set clear expectations from the start and never shied away from tough questions,” said Woody. Even as new team members joined mid-project, handoffs were seamless. “They’ve helped us avoid architectural missteps and move faster and smarter.”

Building a scalable system for experimentation and performance

Webflow gave us the confidence — and executive buy-in — to stop reinventing the wheel. Our engineers can now focus on building the core experience that sets us apart, not infrastructure that’s already been solved elsewhere.

-  Woody Whitman, VP of Engineering, LegalShield

As part of their shift toward a faster, more responsive web experience, LegalShield has embraced testing and iteration. And with Webflow, those efforts are finally gaining traction.

Using Webflow Optimize, the team runs A/B and multivariate tests across layouts, copy, and embedded flows. Unlike their previous tool, which favored the control, Optimize allows them to learn from both successes and failures — a key ingredient for a strong testing culture. “Running experiments with our previous solution required redirects, which introduced bias. Sometimes we’d flip a winning test to 50/50 just to validate results. It wasn’t a minor issue — it made testing less reliable. Now with AI Optimize, we finally have full confidence in our results,” said Woody.

One recent test of an embedded checkout experience led to a 12-point lift in desktop conversions. When the mobile variant underperformed, the team quickly identified the issue and adjusted. “The real value is in quickly eliminating bad ideas, and that’s often overlooked,” said Woody.

Webflow also gives marketers the flexibility to test value props tied to specific legal services and search terms — experiments that previously would’ve required engineering support. “Before, we’d get 75% through a content update, only to hit a blocker because a widget didn’t work,” said Woody. “Now, the content team can move without waiting on engineering. It’s been a fundamental shift.”

By consolidating platforms, the team now manages content with more consistency. Localization support in Webflow makes it easier to deliver accurate, compliant messaging across markets. LegalShield serves English, Spanish, and French-speaking users in the U.S. and Canada, and now has granular control over regional content without adding complexity.

“Webflow handles deployment, hosting, optimization, CDN delivery, and localization without touching our internal systems,” said Woody. “We’ve fully decoupled our marketing sites from design infrastructure, which keeps our stack cleaner and reduces tech sprawl.”

Laying the groundwork for personalization, AEO, and optimized customer journeys

We quickly realized we had to go from SEO-friendly to SEO and AI-friendly. And with Webflow, we didn’t have to wait for new features or build custom tooling from scratch — the capabilities were already there.

-  Woody Whitman, VP of Engineering, LegalShield

LegalShield’s new site sets the stage for their next phase of digital growth. By reducing engineering bottlenecks, developers are free to focus on product innovation, personalization, and new purchase flows. Updates that once took weeks now take days. The team is more responsive to customer needs and better positioned to compete on modern search surfaces through AEO and AI-powered optimization.

As search behavior evolves and AI-generated answers begin dominating results pages, LegalShield knew traditional SEO wouldn’t be enough. By consolidating their content across multiple distinct stores, like a lawyer directory, regional landing pages, and legal blog, LegalShield could clearly define schema and enable AI systems to crawl and interpret their content more intelligently. “Instead of treating everything like a blog article, we could define object types, like ‘organization’ for our lawyer directory and ‘article’ for our blog content,” Woody explained. “That made it easier for AI to consume and generate accurate, structured responses.”

This shift didn’t just help with visibility — it set the groundwork for AI-powered user experiences, improved metadata control, and more performant content.

Looking ahead, LegalShield is focused on deepening personalization, expanding experimentation, and delivering a seamless experience from every touchpoint in the user’s journey.With Webflow as their foundation, engineering is advancing next-gen capabilities like authentication and point-of-purchase flows, while marketing accelerates testing tied to legal topics and user behavior with AI Optimize. 

All of it supports a larger goal: reaching the next generation of members and making equal access to justice a reality.