We all know running a website isn’t a walk in the park. It is a marathon run in the Amazon forest, figuratively speaking! A real estate website needs a lot of running around to ensure that the page loads easily and quickly. Any amount of delay can affect the conversion of your customers.
Why is it important?
Good question. Let’s take a physical example. You go to a fast-food restaurant and order your menu. If the service is fast enough, you’d want to keep visiting the place. But if it delays your order, no matter what the reason is, you’d think twice before visiting again. Even if it is the best joint in your neighbourhood and has warm customer service, you would care as long as they serve you in time.
The same goes for the virtual world. But the wait limit here comes down to a matter of seconds. If your site takes just a second longer than it should load, then you’ve already lost 7% of your potential customers. One second delay would lead to 11% fewer page views. Now you do the math to calculate the loss your business would have to deal with.
My website is pretty fast enough and, yet there isn’t much traffic
Your concern is legit. No matter how fast and efficient your website is, it still might not come up in Google’s search results immediately. That is because the giant search engine’s algorithms keep changing.
The current version picks up the websites that have a mobile-friendly approach. If your website is available in mobile versions and it runs decently then congratulations! You will show up in Google searches quite immediately. The search giant wants to provide the best user experience. So, it chooses the ones that are compatible with desktop and all the versions of smartphones.
What can I do to increase my website’s visibility?
You need to improve the page load time. This time is nothing but the time your page takes to load in any given gadget. It differs from industry to industry.
For classified and local pages, it takes approx. 7.9 secs (beings the fastest) while the longest time is 11.3 secs for travel websites. Overall, an average of 7 seconds is considered for any website to load to its viewers.
Here is what you can do to improve your site’s performance,
Average Speed Index:This talks about the average time it takes for the mobile page to display its content to its users. Increase the efficiency by reducing the HTTP requests your page makes for every element of the page. 80% of the web page’s load time is consumed by downloading different parts of the page such as images, scripts, style sheets etc.
Minify:If you reduce the size of the files that raise the HTTP requests, you will eventually increase your website’s speed. The process of reducing the number is called minifying. It removes unnecessary pieces of code and whitespaces. You can start with reducing your JavaScript and HTML files.
Average Time to First Byte:It’s the time your website takes to load the first element of the page. Google’s analysis recommends it to be below 1.3 seconds. By improving the DNS lookup and the server processing you will be able to save tons of time. If there are any issues you face at this stage, do not hesitate to get professional help. With an efficient email search tool find the best one in town to assist you out!
Cache the browser: Don’t we all accept caches every time we visit a new page through our browser. It usually takes around 2.4 seconds (on avg.) to download all the JavaScripts, images, style sheets etc. For the first instance, it might take some time, but the performance and the efficiency improve much better for the subsequent visits. Since the caches have already been downloaded in your visitors drive, it takes comparatively lesser time to load.
Final thoughts
A real estate website takes a lot more work compared to any others because of the multiple images and extensive data files it has to use. So, before you jump right in and make changes to your website, analyse it thoroughly and check what works and what doesn’t.
But always remember time is very precious in the virtual world and every second spared count! Go ahead and figure out what’s best. Time’s ticking, tick tock – tick tock!
