Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
There’s so much that goes into having an effective real estate website. Most real estate professionals spend lots of time and effort ensuring that the content of their site is at its best through efforts like search engine optimization (SEO). Yet there’s more that goes into making your real estate website stand out from the others: page performance. It’s an aspect of your site that you might not think about much, but it’s essential that you don’t overlook what bad page performance can cause. Here’s why this aspect of your real estate website is so crucial for success.
When you get down to essentials, page performance refers to how responsive your website is when it’s visited by users. This includes how quickly it loads once someone clicks on a link that takes them to your site as well as how long it takes for that same user to navigate to different parts of your site. Good page performance means your site not just looks good but loads quickly so that users can access the information they’re looking for without waiting.
To be clear, this is an important metric. No one wants to wait for long, drawn-out moments for a page to load in, especially when today’s internet is faster and more responsive than ever. In fact, it’s become so important that Google now measures page performance and factors things like load speed and site responsiveness into its search results - two pages with identical content will be ranked differently if one has better page performance metrics than the other.
With page performance such an integral factor for your real estate website’s effectiveness, it’s obvious that you’ll need to ensure that users find your site as quick and responsive as possible. Thankfully, there are ways to analyze page performance and then take action to improve it where needed. One of the first steps you can take is to rely on Google Search Console, a free service that offers you page performance insights gathered by Google Chrome users.
Google Search Console will tell you how fast your site is overall, but to diagnose specific problems you’ll need more detailed feedback. There are several free speed test websites available on the internet that will let you input your website URL and then provide you with a detailed analysis of exactly what aspects of your real estate website aren’t performing properly. This is incredibly useful, as you (or your web designer) can’t begin addressing page performance issues without first understanding what the specific problems are. Once you know what’s causing issues, you can then formulate strategies for addressing those problems.
Unless you’ve got experience in building websites from scratch, there may be little that you can actively do to make your real estate website load faster and be more responsive. Some things you can do yourself include sourcing images for your content that aren’t too large, as the bigger the file, the longer it takes to load. However, the majority of the work for improving page performance requires the specialized knowledge of a web designer. If you have these capabilities personally, there are dozens of strategies you can employ. If you don’t, be sure to speak to a qualified web designer who can implement these changes for you.
