May
1
Saying that no one likes a slow-loading website is a huge understatement. In one study of online shoppers done in 2006 by Akamai and JupiterResearch, 33% said that 4 seconds is all they are prepared to wait before abandoning a retail website.
Now it may seem a little hasty to automatically apply the 4 second time limit to a real estate website, but you can safely assume that if your real estate website takes much longer to load, your visitors are very likely to leave.
Your website may be loading slow without you even realising!
How can that be? Simple. Your typical web browser stores images and other parts of the websites you visit on your computer’s hard drive for the very purpose of quickly loading websites you visit often without having to download everything from the Internet each time. This means that since your real estate website is probably one you visit regularly, you could very well be viewing much of it from a copy stored in your PC, giving you the false impression that it loads fast, when the real experience for a new visitor could be very different indeed.
Fortunately, there is an easy test you can do by forcing your browser to reload your page from the Internet so that you can see its real performance. Just visit the page on your real estate website that you want to test and hold down the Control key and then click on Refresh in Internet Explorer, or hold down Shift and click Reload in Firefox.
What can you do to make your website load faster?
Get a faster web host: One of the most common causes of a slow loading website is that the server it is hosted on is not up to the job, so your hosting service is the first thing you have to test if you are having loading time problems. While moving to a better web hosting service could solve the problem, proper web design is paramount to giving your visitors the fastest experience possible. The following points are just some of the things that a professional web designer will be looking at to make sure your real estate website has what it takes to make it in the speed department.
Optimise your images: While it is not always practical to cut down on the number of images on a real estate website, you can make sure they load as fast as possible by optimising them for the web. A common mistake is to take photos of properties and upload them to your website without making sure they are as small to download as possible.
Avoid unnecessary bells and whistles: Flash animations and other fancy widgets may look nice on your website, but if they take too long to load, few people will stick around long enough to see them anyway. If you use any of this, make sure it is well optimised and test to see how it affects your website’s loading time.
Keep your site design simple: We said simple, not plain! In fact, an experienced web designer should be able to build you a professional-looking real estate website that has a clean underlying structure that allows it to load quickly. It is also very important to make sure that the HTML code (the backbone of your website) is also efficiently written for best results.
So remember, speed is one of the keys to keeping the visitors you get to your website. Go ahead and test your website as we describe above, and see how it measures up. If you want to learn more about how to improve your website’s loading speed or otherwise make the best of your real estate website, please contact us at Sorted Sites for a free and no-obligation consultation and assessment of your needs.
Online Marketing
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