So let’s discover why website speed is important for Estate Agents:
39% of people say they wouldn’t use a website again if it was slow (Hubspot).
A one-second delay in your website loading means:
- 11% less page views
- 16% worse user experience
- 7% less sales (Crazy Egg)
It’s actually estimated slow website loading speeds costs businesses $2.6billion every year (Inside Design).
It’s that important.
But why does site speed affect your website this much? Why is it a particular challenge for estate agents? And how do you improve yours?
That’s what we’ll look at now.
Let’s get started.
Why fast website loading speeds are essential
1. Patience (or lack of)
When someone lands on your website, you have six seconds to impress them.
Thanks to the likes of Amazon, we want everything faster, quicker, now.
Plus, your customers aren’t just comparing your website to your competitors: they’re comparing how fast your website is compared with every website they use.
If your customer can go onto their phone and order a taxi to arrive in less than five minutes and a meal from their favourite restaurant delivered to their door in under 20 minutes, they’re not going to hang around for 20 seconds for one page of your website to load.
Your customers judge your website against the speedy apps and websites they use every day – not your competitors.
If your website feels like it takes ‘forever’ to load, you’ll turn people away.
2. User experience
Slow website = bad website.
It’s unprofessional, annoying and it’s losing you leads every day.
But it’s not just your visitors who will punish you for it.
3. Search engine optimisation (SEO)
We’ve covered the basics of search engine optimisation for estate agent websites in this article already, so you’ll know now how important it is.
Google’s artificial intelligence isn’t ready to take over the world just yet (Terminator – wait a few more years) but it’s pretty clever.
In fact, it’s so clever it can simulate a user experience on a website. The easier a website is to use (which includes how fast it is to load), the better it scores you and the higher you rank.
So how do you improve your website loading speed?
Now you know why it’s so important, let’s look at how to fix your slow website or make it even faster than it is now.
1. Compress your images
You’ll have a lot of images on your website – all in really high definition to show potential vendors how good you’ll make their home look.
But with great photos comes big file sizes. And with big file sizes comes slower loading speeds.
How do you sort this? You compress your images.
But don’t just google ‘photo compression software’ – use Photoshop to make sure the quality of the image stays sharp.
2. Get better web hosting
Website hosting is where your website ‘lives’ on the internet.
Think about houses: while some are close to main roads and great transport links, others are in the middle of nowhere.
The house in the middle of town is quicker for most people to get to, while the house in the sticks isn’t.
And that’s the same as your website hosting. If your website is hosted on a super-fast server (like all the websites we host are), website loading speeds are quicker.
3. Optimise your code
We’re getting more technical here.
Whether you’re using HTML, JavaScript, or CSS, reducing the size of your code dramatically improves site speed.
This isn’t something we’d recommend taking a stab at yourself because removing one comma in the wrong place can bring down your entire website.
If you or a member of your team does know code, though, a good place to start is to remove unnecessary characters or unused bits of codes and comments.
4. Less redirects
You’ll notice sometimes when you click on a link, your browser address window changes three/four times in very quick succession before taking you to the page you wanted to visit.
This is called a redirect.
Every page you visit has to load, so the more redirects you have, the longer it appears the one page is taking to load.
The less redirects, the quicker your page loading speed.
5. Cache more, load less
Every time you visit a website, the website uploads information onto your computer. This means the next time you visit, your website ‘remembers’ some of it.
You may have heard people saying ‘clear your cache’ and this is what they’re referring to because, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of data stored there.
This is good news for your site speed, though! Because the more data you store on a visitor’s computer, the quicker your page loads.
So make sure you’ve got your cache turned on and the expiration date is set to one year.
6. Host less on your website
Good estate agent’s websites use a mix of media.
If you’re not sure if your website is good, we made a list of best practices for you to read here.
But the more stuff that’s hosted on your website, the more it has to load when you log onto a page.
So instead of uploading your videos directly to play from your website, it’s much more efficient to let YouTube/Vimeo do it and include a box that streams the video from those platforms.
We call this ‘embedding’ and it dramatically improves load times.
7. Delay JavaScript loading
Back to the technical stuff now.
Delaying (or deferring – as it’s known) JavaScript essentially orders larger files to wait until the smaller files have loaded.
If your overall site speed is slow, this is what makes pages ‘jump’ after 20-30 seconds (which is really annoying).
But if you’ve done everything else to make sure your site speed is fast, deferring JavaScript loading can be used effectively.
8. Prioritise content at the top of the page
This might seem a little: ‘what they don’t know, can’t hurt them,’ and ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ but it’s an effective way to reduce your website loading time.
Edit your code so the images and text at the top of your page loads before the information at the bottom. The idea with this is, by the time the user scrolls down, you have a few more seconds to load that information.
9. Lighten the loads with CDNs
Your server may be the fastest in the world, but if your website gets a lot of traffic, everyone’s queuing up to use the same server.
It’s like if McDonalds only had one restaurant in a city centre.
If they did, they’d be inundated and the queue would be out the door (making people change their minds and go to Burger King).
But they don’t do that, do they? They open multiple locations to reduce the waiting time and pressure on the staff.
That’s exactly what a Content Delivery Network (CDN) does: it creates a network of servers so all the pressure isn’t lumped on one.
10. Delete unnecessary plugins
We see this all the time when we take over client’s websites: loads of plugins installed doing absolutely nothing.
And (almost as bad), out of date plugins.
Plugins can (and do) work well on websites but if you have too many, they slow the site speed down, leave security risks and can cause technical issues.
So it’s important you test your plugins to see which ones are necessary and which ones aren’t.
The list could go on…
There are more ways to improve your site speed but we’re conscious we’re going on a bit here.
By now, you’ll appreciate how important site speed is but also how much technical knowledge is needed to improve it.
Our website developers at White Digital have done this every single day for too many years than we’d like to admit, and it’s just one of the improvements we make to estate agent’s websites to make sure you’re the number one estate agent in your area.
To find out more about how we can help, click here.
