WordPress The Best Platform For Your Real Estate Listing Photos

They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words but displaying them on a top-notch WordPress real estate website could be worth a 1,000 new customers.

Let’s face it – images rule the web. Entire multi-billion websites have been built on the display of photos – Instagram is one. Pinterest is another. Every post on Facebook is essentially image based and statistics show there are 350 million photos posted on that platform every day. Snapchat, an instant photo website, just went public and generated billions in stock pricing. And their photos only last a few seconds.

With today’s smartphone camera technology, everybody snaps a photo of everything.

However, as a real estate professional, you should be more concerned about HOW those photos are displayed.

And the undisputed best platform for displaying photos is a WordPress real estate website.

Here’s why. With a huge chunk of market share, WordPress is essentially the leading content management platform in the world. The developers have created a web tool that is friendly to users (brokers and agents), consumers and search engines.

What this means is that it is super-easy for a broker or agent to add multiple photographs to a WordPress real estate website.

Because of the coding architecture behind WordPress, Google and Bing have the easiest time running their bots over the pages and determining how to rank those pages.

And consumers find WordPress-based websites the easiest to navigate to discover the answers they want.

Take photos for example, the most critical marketing tool for brokers and agents besides a description of the property itself.

With a WordPress real estate website, it is super-easy to add a photo. All you do is hit the “Add Media” button and upload the latest image onto a page.

You don’t need a webmaster to do this for you. You don’t need to create a long string of HTML code to add a photo to a page. You don’t even have to create a certain size. WordPress does all that for you.

Hit the “Add Media” image and upload an image.

You will see there is a field to add a caption. Obviously, a great caption is very important. In fact, research shows that captions are read 300% more times than actual text. Huge impact. There are also search-engine implications as well.

There’s an “alternative-text” box on the page. This is an important field to fill out. That’s where you can enter a few words about the image itself. For example, if it’s a home in the “Under Par Country Club” community, you will want to add that description in this field. This is critical because Google and Bing can’t read photographs, but they do scan that “alt-text” box to find relevant keywords.

Next, choose the size. WordPress will usually give you a choice of three or four sizes. The size depends on how you plan to use the image. Obviously, bigger is better. But you don’t want to go too big, because that could affect your site speed as the server struggles to load up your page for viewers.

You might want to use that image, just for a thumbnail photo as well. In that case, you can choose a smaller image.

There is also another field in WordPress where you can link the image. This is important. Perhaps you are loading the image on your homepage to show off a new listing. In the link field, you can insert the URL to the page where the property is listed with all the full property description and other images.

Next, this is where Google and Bing come in. Those search engines need to determine what your webpage is all about as far as keywords and relevancy. Obviously, the right text is essential. The search engine bots will scan the text and look for keywords they can use to determine what the page is about.

Including images is important for search rankings. For one, Google and Bing see that you are using images to enhance the text and they will give you points for helping readers. Google and Bing also depend on the caption for that image and that “alt-text” we mentioned one before.

With the right WordPress theme, and there are literally tens of thousands to choose from, those real estate photos can really pop on a broker or agent’s website. A broker or agent can choose to display big, beautiful, colorful photos that have a strong emotional impact on a home buyer.

In addition, just think how impressed a seller will be when they see how the photographs of their home can be displayed in this big bold manner as well?

A WordPress real estate website can also host an array of easy to use “galleries” or slide shows that allow a broker or agent to load a large number of images.

As we said, this is the era of the photograph. A consumer does not just want to see a few photos of the front of a house, the living room, kitchen and back of the house.

They expect to see a myriad of photos showing every inch of the house – closets, shrubs in the backyard, four or five angles of the front of the house from different perspectives, etc. etc. etc.

With WordPress, a broker or agent can supply all those images themselves. Essentially, they are empowered to perform all of these tasks. They can control the content on their websites. Quickly and effortlessly.

This is the era of the image. A broker or agent must have the most-advanced platform available today to maximize use of images.

For some examples of the power of WordPress real estate websites, talk to a Home Junction representative today.