Comparison
Insurance website builders, compared honestly.
There are three ways an independent P&C agency gets a website. We build one of them, so read us with that in mind — but two of them are genuinely the right call for some agencies, and this page says which. What none of them do is rank on their own.
The three options
What you are actually choosing between.
General DIY builders
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy
- Typical cost
- $15–$50 / month
- Time to live
- A weekend of your own time
Where it wins
- Cheapest way to exist online
- You control every edit, instantly
- No contract, no vendor to chase
Where it costs you
- Nothing in the template understands insurance
- You are the designer, copywriter, and SEO — on top of running an agency
- Ranking is entirely on you, and most agency owners never get to it
- The cheap monthly hides the real cost — the hours are yours, and they are worth more selling
Right if you need a presentable site this month, have one location, and are genuinely willing to maintain it yourself.
Insurance template platforms
The insurance-specific website vendors
- Typical cost
- $100–$300 / month, plus add-ons, often on a contract
- Time to live
- Days to launch
Where it wins
- Built for the industry — coverage pages and quote forms come standard
- Compliance and carrier content handled for you
- Fast to launch and someone else keeps the lights on
Where it costs you
- Your site shares its structure with hundreds of other agencies
- Limited say over layout, and often over the content itself
- Read the exit terms before you sign — the site frequently is not yours
- The advertised price is usually the site alone; reviews, listings and SEO are billed separately
Right if you want off your own plate quickly, you are fine looking like your peers, and you have read what happens when you leave.
What we do
A custom build
PolicySite
- Typical cost
- $2,000 once, then $149–$549 / month
- Time to live
- Four to six weeks
Where it wins
- Structure built around the searches you actually want to win
- A quote flow designed for your lines, not a generic contact form
- You own the site outright at launch — not after a term, not on licence
- Coverage and location pages nobody else in your market is running
- One number covers the site, local SEO, reviews, and content
Where it costs you
- Costs more up front than either alternative
- Takes weeks rather than days
- Overkill if you only need a business card on the internet
Right if the site is meant to produce quote requests rather than confirm you exist, and you are prepared to treat it as a channel.
Which one is you
Find your situation and do that.
- You want to rank for coverage-plus-city searches in your market
- That needs a page per line of business and real local pages. Templates rarely allow the structure, and on DIY it rarely gets built. This is what a custom build is for.
- Your site gets traffic but almost nobody requests a quote
- That is a structure and conversion problem, and a new template will not fix it — it will move it. Start with the free audit and we will tell you which of the two you have.
- You are paying separately for a site, reviews, listings, and SEO
- Add the line items up before you renew. Bundled platform pricing routinely lands past what one custom build plus one plan costs — and at the end of it you still do not own the site.
- You want to own what you are paying for
- Then read every vendor's exit terms first. Ours is one line: the site is yours at launch, once the build is paid. Not after a term, not on licence.
- You need something live this month and money is tight
- A DIY builder. Anyone telling you to spend four figures on your first site is selling, not advising — come back when the referrals stop covering the calendar.
- You are on a builder and it is genuinely producing quote requests
- Then stay. Rebuilding a site that is doing its job is the most common waste of money in this industry. Check your form submissions before you assume it is not.
The question underneath
A builder is a tool. It is not a strategy.
Every option on this page can produce a site that looks fine. The difference is what happens after launch, and that comes down to structure: whether there is a page for each line of business you write, whether the quote flow is short enough to finish on a phone, and whether anyone is adding coverage pages six months from now.
You can get that structure on a DIY builder if you are willing to do the work. Most agency owners are not, which is fine — running an agency is the job. What does not work is buying any of the three and expecting the tool itself to bring in quote requests.
That is the whole reason we sell a plan alongside the build rather than a site on its own. Somebody has to add the coverage page, ask for the review, and check what the search terms did last month. On the other two options, that somebody is you.
If you want the longer version, we wrote up the five reasons agency sites fail to convert and what an agency site should actually cost.
Questions
What agency owners ask when comparing.
Is a website builder good enough for an insurance agency?
For a single-location agency that mostly gets business by referral, yes — a builder is genuinely good enough, and the money is better spent on your Google Business Profile. It stops being good enough when you want the site to bring in people who have never heard of you, because that needs a page per line of business and real local pages, and most templates will not let you build that structure.
Why do template sites struggle to rank?
Not because they are templates. Because of what they do to structure: one catch-all services page competing for six different searches, thin location pages that read identically with the town name swapped, and no page that is genuinely about the coverage someone is searching for. Google ranks pages that are about one thing. Most agency templates are built around what an agency wants to say rather than what a shopper is searching.
Can you rebuild what I already have instead of starting over?
Often, yes, and it is usually the cheaper answer. If the content is sound and the structure is the problem, restructuring beats rebuilding. The audit tells you which situation you are in, and we will say so plainly if the honest answer is that you do not need us yet.
What happens to my site if I stop working with you?
You keep it. Your domain is in your agency's name from day one and the site is yours on full payment. This is worth asking every vendor you talk to, because the answer varies more than you would expect and it is the question that ends the most vendor relationships.
We will tell you which one you need.
The free 5-point audit looks at what you have now and comes back with the honest answer — including when that answer is that a builder is fine and you should keep your money.