Website Maintenance for Insurance Agencies and Brokers: The Guide [Why, What to Look for, Best Plan]

A poorly maintained insurance website is easy to spot – it’s plagued by broken links, sluggish to load, and pretty frustrating to use. That’s going to put a lot of customers off.

And, with hundreds of thousands of insurers across the US, they’re not short on choice…

Don’t give them this option; instead, delegate your website to a maintenance expert for insurance companies and enjoy a perfectly functional site and peace of mind!

Below, we explore:

• What website maintenance is
• Why website maintenance is important for insurance companies
• How to find the right maintenance agency partner
• What to look for in the perfect web maintenance packages

What Is Insurance Website Maintenance?

Insurance website maintenance is the regular upkeep of your broker site with software updates, security checks, feature testing, and content optimization – to keep it secure, informative, and running quickly and smoothly.

Website care for insurance brokers includes:

• Updating your site’s software so it’s safe, efficient, and reliable
• Producing regular helpful content on insurance industry changes
• Managing search engine optimization (SEO) to help you reach the right people (e.g., homeowners looking for quotes)
• Eliminating broken links, a major cause of online content loss – they’re the reason a quarter of all web pages are gone forever
• Backing up sensitive data (for quick restore in the event of breaches)
• Reaching optimal performance and positive user experience to keep people engaged

Why Is Website Maintenance Important to Insurance Agencies and Brokers?

Think of website maintenance as a type of insurance in itself. As a broker, you’re hiring an expert to “insure” your site against hacking, dips in visitor traffic, and SEO problems.

Without that insurance, you’re on your own, juggling all the tasks listed above. If you can’t manage them, your customers may end up looking elsewhere while your site leaks data and your reputation crumbles. Unthinkable, right?

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So, let’s have a quick Q&A session to explore why website maintenance is so important.

Why should I bother maintaining my website?

A well-maintained insurance website grabs people’s interest and gets them invested in what you have to offer. With the right preventive maintenance package, your site will:

• Seize visitors’ attention with quick-loading, relevant content
• Save people time by giving them quick access to resources (such as coverage guides and quote builders)
• Appear in relevant search results (e.g., to people searching for health insurance quotes)
• Build trust and credibility with helpful guides, case studies, and insightful testimonials

It takes less than a second for someone to build an impression about you, so it’s wise to make it count with a well-maintained image.

Is website security really that important?

Absolutely. Research found that over 39% of hacked websites were outdated. Besides doing security updates, maintaining your insurance website makes it more resilient against hacking, data theft, and site errors.

Consider the sensitive financial and personally identifiable information you hold. It’s highly desirable and valuable to hackers, and insurance companies are often targets.

Even the biggest insurers have lost hundreds of thousands of records due to cybersecurity failures. GEICO and the TIC, for example, were fined a staggering $11.3 million due to poor data protection standards.

Good cybersecurity starts with a secure website that runs on the HTTPS protocol, which encrypts user data.

A well-maintained website also uses secure payment technology, relying on malware protection to detect and remove security issues. Even simply updating your WordPress site ensures it’s safer against hackers trying to exploit weaknesses in older versions.

What is user experience (and is it a big deal)?

User experience, or UX, refers to what your visitors expect from a reliable insurance broker website – such as:

• Content with quick load times that looks smooth on all devices
• Features like guides and calculators to help them choose the right coverage
• Internal links that direct them to different policy pages and support guides

And UX is a huge deal. Take the auto insurance industry, where website experiences contribute more to satisfaction than agent support!

Failing to maintain your site’s usability also undoes a lot of other maintenance work. You might grab the right attention, but with a slow, unintuitive, and uninspiring experience, you’re throwing your search rankings away.

Why do I need SEO?

SEO covers tasks you can do to make your website appear more prominently in search results to relevant people.

SEO helps you grab the top spot in any set of search results, giving you ten times the chance to attract a click compared to the tenth spot. Around 27.6% of searchers typically click the first result.

One of the key reasons for running your insurer website is to help you find “leads” or relevant searchers and to encourage them to buy policies when they arrive.

However, without SEO maintenance, your website fails to rank on relevant keywords, leading to fewer clicks and purchases. You might even attract the wrong audience by accident (e.g., people looking for car insurance when you specialize in home contents).

With the right SEO strategy, you can target relevant search keywords, publish helpful content updates on topics that matter to your visitors, and maintain an efficient, secure website.

None of this is guesswork. Google openly ranks websites higher in search results based on their relevance, quality, and usability in line with the searcher’s intent.

What does a poorly maintained insurance website look like?

A poorly maintained insurance website lacks credibility and is easy to spot.

You won’t project a trustworthy image if you lead visitors to dead ends, fail to adjust your site for mobile devices, and regularly allow errors to run amok.

The same applies to outdated content. If your blog hasn’t been updated for two years, and you’re avoiding adding valuable features like calculators, sliders, and quote builders, it doesn’t look like you either care or know what you’re doing.

And that’s why investing in a website maintenance service is such good value for insurance providers. With a team of experts making sure none of these pitfalls exist, you save money on fixing everything up yourself and actually build revenue instead of losing it.

How To Perform Website Maintenance for Insurance Brokers and Agencies

You could go down the DIY route…

But let’s be honest here – you need to focus your time and energy on your core business, which is why it makes the most sense to delegate your website maintenance to an affordable, reliable expert who always has your back and understands your industry, thanks to a portfolio of insurance clients.

Think of it as total peace of mind for a few hundred bucks a month.

Follow these three steps to make the right choice:

1. Understand what you’re looking for

You should ideally look for a maintenance plan that can:

• Scan and isolate security threats and update your website
• Create and publish content
• Design and manage your SEO
• Spot and fix errors
• Edit your website and add new features
• Ensure your site is fully responsive on mobile devices
• Analyze your web traffic with Google Analytics and target new audiences
• Back up your data and restore it
• Help you transfer between web hosts

Even if you already have an internal team, there are huge benefits to delegating these tasks. Consider hiring an external maintenance agency that can take on all of the above so your internal crew has more time for email marketing sequences and CRM development tasks, for example.

Our client, Heffernan Insurance Brokers, swears by this choice. As one of California’s top brokers, the firm already has large in-house IT and marketing teams. However, it now offloads website risk and maintenance to StateWP so it can focus on developing new technology that supports its outreach and growth strategies.

2. Find the right insurance website maintenance partner

Next, look carefully for a legitimate expert in website support for insurance brokers. That’s someone who knows your industry and has a track record of maintaining broker sites with great results. They understand:

• What your visitors are looking for
• How to build trust and confidence in your firm
• Which SEO and performance optimization strategies drive excellent results for insurance websites, and how to tweak them to your needs

Seek out a fairly-priced company (between $200 and $600 a month, depending on the features) that can proactively handle all the points on the maintenance checklist outlined in step one.

For example, ask whether they have 24/7 support and real-time performance monitoring via a maintenance dashboard. And don’t forget that you need a maintenance service provider that has your back on demand – or in other words, resolves issues and queries quickly.

So look for a partner that’s open, honest, and uses clear language to take care of problems now, not kick them down the road and cover them up.

Just as your customers choose you based on your reputation, you should choose a maintenance firm based on its credibility and customer trust.

CAL Insurance, for instance, came to us because its old vendor didn’t meet its expectations regarding security and overall protection. StateWP now gives the website 24/7 support and has improved its speed and security measures.

3. Outsource website maintenance and optimize site performance

Delegating to a maintenance partner gives you peace of mind, knowing it saves you time, money, and effort. As explored above, you can still benefit from time and cost savings even if you already have experts in-house.

Now – you might be considering working with freelancers. Although freelance partnerships can be beneficial, you only ever have access to a single point of contact and expertise to defend against potential threats. That’s a risk.

With an agency, you get:

• A team of experts ready to go with no fixed hours, salaries, or training needs
• A high-performing site with great UX, device compatibility, and error management
• Improved chances of appearing highly in relevant search results
• Your own helpdesk on demand
• A partner that scales with your company, helping you to build new features and sites

You’ll be following Costero Brokers’ lead. Understandably, this agency was busy and struggled with regular maintenance tasks. Instead of letting its website develop performance issues, Costero chose StateWP for daily backups, feature testing, and edits.

Doing so means the firm can now focus on actively developing insurance products, with its website completely cared for.

Get Started Today with WordPress Website Maintenance

StateWP’s three monthly maintenance plans, Starter, Premium, and Elite, are designed to take care of everything your site needs.

The Premium and Elite plans, in particular, cover the level of oversight and ongoing care that busy insurance agency websites demand and give you the best possible return on investment.

Elite gives you access to all the benefits of our Premium plan and exclusive perks such as:

• Regular updates and content editing
  • Stay on top of an ever-changing industry
• Complete SEO performance auditing
  • Be competitive in your niche
• A staging site
  • For testing new features, adding interactive customer tools, and going through rounds of approval without affecting your live site

It’s ideal for companies like Tangram Insurance, a Heffernan Company under our watch. The agency relies on our maintenance experts to take care of content management and save time by delegating new content production and in-depth SEO tweaks to help it rank.

Our Premium plan is another solid maintenance plan for insurance companies of all sizes that have broken free from their old providers and want incredible value for money.

Premium website support for insurance agents includes:

• Mobile design testing (ideal, given that well over a third of insurance customers are using mobile browsers)
• Direct account management with a single point of contact you can rely on
• Monthly website edits, reliable backups, and tweaks
• Performance boosts

One of our Premium clients, Morris & Garritano Insurance, saw the clear benefits of upgrading to this package after joining us on a Starter plan! The client found it was requesting enough extra support already, and upgrading actually saved time and money.

“ I feel confident that our website is secure and running properly with StateWP. They’re also just really great people to work with. Highly recommend!”
– Morris & Garritano

The bottom line is that a well-maintained insurance website looks great, attracts regular customers, is free of potential issues, and generates more revenue for your business.

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If you’d like to know more about how experts can manage your website while you run your business, now’s the time to delegate to StateWP.

To get a taste of what to expect, start with a quick audit to see how much regular maintenance could improve your site.

Or, if you’d like to speak to Garrett and see how our comprehensive services work in action, reach out for a free demo with zero commitment.

Website Maintenance for Insurance: FAQs

Let’s close with a few questions and answers about periodic website maintenance for insurance.