WordPress Real Estate Themes to Upgrade Sites on a Budget

WordPress real estate themes that are pre-built for brokers and agents can be a tremendous benefit when it comes time to redesign a website, especially if you are on a budget.

How Often Should You Change Your Website?

Generally, experts recommend that a company seriously consider redesigning a website every three years on average. However, and this is a big factor, if you are not satisfied with the lead conversion rates from your current website or you noticed them dropping off, a broker or agent should seriously consider an immediate upgrade ASAP.

Check your analytics for traffic trends. Is your website not attracting as many visitors as before? Is the bounce rate for them leaving higher than previously? Do visitors spend less time on your website? Those are all signs that a website is not performing as well as it should be. Even if your are satisfied with your website’s performance, it’s always good to plan for a change in the future. When it comes to updating your real estate website, there are two main reasons – staying up-to-date and generating buzz.

Website Update Reason 1: Stay Up-to-Date

Websites can become stale. Boring in appearance. Old-fashioned. If a broker makes any changes with their branding, their website should obviously reflect those changes. And if your competitors are all sprucing up their websites, you certainly don’t want to have yours sitting there looking like something out of the 1990s.

There are also new advancements and real estate plugins that can add powerful new features or tools that consumers will love. That could result is better metrics, more visitors and more time on the page, which can also translate into more lead forms filled out and phone inquiries to your office.

Website Update Reason 2: Generate Buzz

Another reason to change a website is to create buzz and excitement about your organization. Your agents will love to see a fancy new design with brilliant images and new features such as school data or neighborhood demographics. You can also use a new design to generate some curiosity with your current clients and prospects. Everybody loves new. We are hard-coded to seek out newness. Blast out your website’s new appearance and functionality on social media. Send out mailers. Do an email blast. Pique everybody’s curiosity about the upgrades you made.

“Okay,” a broker might think. “Maybe I should change my website’s look and feel. But brother, the last time we did that, it was a major, major project. Cost plenty of money. Took up a lot of precious time.” This is where pre-made WordPress real estate themes can be a budget and time saver.

Using WordPress Real Estate Themes

As you may know, WordPress is the No. 1 content management system in the world. The platform was built to be user-friendly, making it super simple to load images and content. WordPress is also coded to be indexed effectively for search engines, making it easy for users to optimize content for search engine rankings. This helps the Google and Bing bots read the pages of a website when they determine rankings for certain keywords.

With pre-built WordPress real estate themes, a broker can quickly order a new website with a new, more modern look and feel. What’s great about these real estate themes, is that they require very little custom coding. These WordPress themes already come with many of the features that brokers need – listing pages, photo galleries, lead forms, about us information and much more.

Home Junction goes a step further with their WordPress real estate themes. In addition to the basics, they can also be loaded with important real estate-related features that home buyers want and sellers will love to see alongside their property listings.

Some of those features include:

We talked about how these WordPress real estate themes don’t require much in the way of custom coding, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be customized. Working with the Home Junction team, a broker can order the look and feel they want with custom colors, typography, logos, images, etc.

WordPress Real Estate Plugins

In addition to pre-built WordPress real estate themes, there are also a huge number of pre-built WordPress real estate plugins. If you want a certain feature added to your website, rather than pay a programmer to build it (and probably take weeks and money to do so), there is probably a real estate plugin out there that’s ready to be plugged in.

At last count, there were about 54,000 WordPress plugins. Some are great and effective. Some aren’t. Some are trustworthy and stay current with security measures. Some don’t. Home Junction can help guide you through the plugin process.

Security for WordPress Real Estate Sites

This brings us to another advantage of using WordPress real estate themes. A website should be upgraded from time to time for security reasons. Hackers and other people with bad intentions are constantly coming up with new ways to disrupt legitimate business operations.

Another great advantage of WordPress is that the founders at Automattic are very vigilant and continually upgraded the security of their platform. And they do it automatically (get it?). This feature ensures you feel secure that your site is being protected.

Ease-of-Use for Real Estate Agents

What’s great about WordPress is that it was originally built for use by bloggers. Not only was it built so that it was easy to use by bloggers, but it was also offered at the super low price of zero for bloggers to use. Since the platform became such a huge hit with bloggers, the company decided to offer a more sophisticated version for businesses. All with the same easy functionality, SEO-friendly coding and regular upgrades.

Now a redesign doesn’t sound like such a big project after all, does it? It’s not, when you decide to take advantage of the great technology (and cost savings) you will find with ready-made WordPress real estate themes.