Websites for immigration consultants

You are a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant, and you need a website. The obvious answer is Squarespace or Wix — and for most businesses, they are the right answer.

For yours, three things are worth thinking about first. Two of them come with the licence, and no general-purpose website builder knows anything about either.

What an RCIC's website actually has to do

Not "look good". It has four jobs, ranked here by how often each one decides whether a visitor becomes an enquiry:

1. Be findable when someone searches your name. Most enquiries start with a person who already has your name — from a friend, a forum, a business card, the CICC register — and is checking whether you are real. If nothing authoritative appears, you have lost them before you knew they existed.
2. Prove the licence in the first three seconds. Your registration number and a link to the College's public register do more work than any amount of design. Immigration is a field with a genuine fraud problem, and the visitor knows it.
3. Say what you actually do. Study permits and refusal appeals are not the same business. A visitor who cannot tell within one screen that you handle their situation leaves.
4. Let them write to you. Most first contact is written, and often sent from another time zone. A phone-only contact page quietly turns those people away.

Everything else — the photography, the animation, the clever scroll effects — is decoration on top of those four.

Squarespace and Wix: honestly, when they are the better choice

They are good products. If you want a blog, a booking system, an online store, a portfolio of case studies, several team pages, or a site in English and French side by side, use one of them. They will do all of that, and a profile page will not.

Three things to know before you start:

• You begin at a blank page. Realistically, that is a weekend of writing plus a weekend of fiddling with layouts — and a fair number of consultants never finish. The site that never launches is the most common outcome, and it is not a knock on the tool.
• The subscription does not stop. Pricing changes, so check theirs — but budget for the plan plus a domain, and expect it to land somewhere in the low hundreds of dollars a year once both are counted.
• They will let you publish anything. This is the important one, and it gets its own section.

The template will happily let you break your own advertising rules

Open any generic website template built for a service business, and you will find slots waiting to be filled with:

98% success rate · 500+ clients helped · ★★★★★ · Approval guaranteed

Every one of those is a number you cannot support. You do not have an audited success rate. You have never counted your clients in a way anyone could verify. Nobody awarded you those stars. And "guaranteed" is not a word that belongs anywhere near an immigration outcome.

You are a licensee of the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants, and your marketing is governed by its Code of Professional Conduct — read the current version on the College's own site, because it is the document that matters and it is not ours to summarise for you. But you can predict its shape: claims you cannot substantiate are a problem, and promises about outcomes are a bigger one.

A general website builder has no opinion about any of this. The template has a big number in a circle, the placeholder says 98%, and it is genuinely easy to leave it there.

That is the practical difference with a purpose-built page. There is no field for a success rate, because we never built one. No template has a slot for a client count or a star rating. The only figure that appears anywhere is years in practice, which you type yourself. It is not that we police what you write — it is that the shape of the thing never invites the claim in the first place.

The third option: your listing, turned into a website

Every RCIC on the College's public register already has a page on rcic.link: your name, your registration number, your city. You did not create it, and it is free.

Claiming it is also free. You add your bio, your services, your photo, your hours, your languages, and the questions you get asked constantly. That much costs nothing, ever.

If you then want it to be a website rather than a directory listing, that is the paid part:

The reason this is faster than starting from scratch is simple: the page already exists, and half of it is already filled in. You are editing, not building. Most people are done in an evening.

The design is not a decision you are stuck with

On a builder, choosing a template is a commitment — changing it later means rebuilding the site, so most people never do, and the site slowly starts to look its age.

Here, it is a dropdown. Switching design takes one click and changes nothing you have written — your services, your FAQs, your photos and your text all move across intact. You can redecorate every January if you feel like it, and nobody has to know.

Your accent colour, your logo, your own words and your own pictures do most of the work of making the page yours; two consultants on the same layout never have the same site. And one or two new designs land each year, so the choice is bigger next year than it is today.

See every design →

So which one

Use Squarespace or Wix if you want a blog, an online store, a team, case studies, or a bilingual site. You will outgrow a profile page, and you should start where you mean to finish.

Use your rcic.link listing if you want a professional page that is live this week, on your own domain, for less than most builders cost — and you would rather spend an evening writing about your practice than choosing between layout options.

Have one built properly if your practice is large enough that the website is doing real work — multiple locations, intake workflows, a content operation, a page for each team member. At that point you want something designed around how you actually work, not around what a template allows.

That is what Elandio does, and it is who builds rcic.link. Sites are built on Kirby or ProcessWire — content management systems chosen because the editing side is genuinely pleasant to use, and because the result is yours: standard hosting, your own server if you want it, no platform to be locked into, and no subscription that switches your site off if it lapses. Advanced features get built because you need them, not because they were on a plan.

It starts around six thousand dollars. That is the honest number, and the reason three options exist: if a $199 page does the job, use the $199 page.

Start with the free part

Your listing exists whether or not you do anything about it. Claiming it costs nothing, takes about ten minutes, and means the page that comes up when someone searches your name is one you control.

Claim your listing →

Still deciding which option fits your practice? Happy to talk it through — view email.

rcic.link is a directory of Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultants built from the College's public register. We are not affiliated with the CICC, and we do not provide immigration advice.