WordPress Real Estate Websites Can Make You Mobile-Ready

WordPress real estate websites are a strategy agents might want to consider after they see these numbers. The National Association of Realtors recently conducted a study called Real Estate in a Digital Age. What they found should cause many brokers and agents to reconsider how they market themselves. If your website is an old clunker from 10 years ago, you should definitely consider an upgrade.

If your website is a few years old, you might start thinking Tesla-like and upgrade to keep up with the innovators. Or be proactive to get ahead of the curve in terms of your competition. Because here’s what the research found:

The typical buyer searched for properties online. Not a big insight. The big news is that the typical buyer now uses their smartphone to look at homes for sale.
She uses that mobile device to check out websites for home listings and photos, including other relevant information concerning the purchase of a property. (We will come back to this in a moment).
The typical buyer searched for homes and contacted an agent. On average they visited 10 homes over a 10-week period.
These next numbers are very important: about 80% of Younger and Older Millennials used their smartphone to look for homes. In case you didn’t know, Millennials are now the LARGEST demographic in the US.
Generation X is not far behind. About 78% of them used their mobile devices for their home search.
Even the majority of Younger Boomers, at 68% used their smartphones.

Are you catching the pattern here?

WordPress Real Estate Websites Excel at Mobile

Your future customers have gone mobile, in a very BIG way.Now, when an agent turns on their laptop and checks out their website, they might think, “Looks fine to me.” However, as you can see by the numbers above, home buyers and sellers are not looking on their laptops for the most part. They are on their iPhones and smartphones (and tablets).

So, how does your website transition over to a mobile format? It could be a mess. Maybe you have an iPhone and your website looks okay there. But what about Android phones? What about tablets?

How Well Does Your Real Estate Website Adjust to Mobile?

Here are some items to check to see if your website is truly mobile-friendly:

Responsive – this basically means that your mobile site responds (adjusts) to different types of mobile devices correctly. As we said, a page on one smartphone might not appear readable on a tablet.
Text – how well does your text adjust? Is the type small and unreadable on a 3.5-inch by 6 inch screen? Are you using a font that is simple and easy to read?
Menus – can people easily find what they are looking for?
Search – is the search button very prevalent and not hidden in a corner like on a desktop format? Again, that button needs to be accessible so people can quickly search for what they want.
Calls to Actions and Forms – are forms easy to fill out on a small device? Is there a button for a form so the user has the option to click on it if they want, as opposed to just shoving the form in front of them on the screen (people generally don’t like this or pop-ups).
Images – are they easy to view? Are they easy to expand? After all, home buyers love to look at home pictures.
Speed– even if your website formats correctly, does it take a long time to do so? (Google has found this is an issue with many mobile websites. Remember, you only have a few seconds, like 3, to capture someone’s attention or they are going to move on to another website).

There is a handy tool developed by Google to see if your website is mobile-friendly – try the tool here.

WordPress Real Estate Websites Make it Easy

Google constantly sends out a message that the world is going mobile. They work with large advertisers to help them transform their websites to a mobile format so they can get the same conversion as they were getting on their desktop sites. But for the average broker and agent, they have to find a way to do it themselves.

Fortunately, there is an easy solution. WordPress Real Estate Websites. As we mentioned before, WordPress is the No. 1 content management system in the world. Many of the top websites, especially news organizations, use the WordPress format because it is so user-friendly. WordPress has seen the writing on the wall. They worked very hard to make sure their platform is responsive and mobile-friendly. That alone is a solid reason why you might consider WordPress Real Estate Websites.

But there’s more. Because Google knows the world is going mobile, they have created a whole new set of algorithms that rank keyword searches specifically for mobile websites. In other words, your website might rank well on your laptop when you conduct a search for valuable keyword searches for the neighborhoods you are farming.

Good for you. But the site might not rank the same on mobile devices. And in that case, you could be missing out on a large number of potential customers (see those stats above again). WordPress developers know this. That’s why they have created a platform that is considered to be super search engine friendly.

WordPress Constantly Updates

Here’s another important factor to consider for WordPress Real Estate Websites. WordPress continually makes upgrades to their platform. Those upgrades are made to keep up with the times and apply to a variety of new issues ranging from new search requirements from Google and Bing to security patches. How well is your site upgraded to meet those challenges? How often?

And one final thought about a possible switch to WordPress. Don’t fret. The transition is not that difficult. There are WordPress real estate website developers (such as Home Junction) that have ready-made themes so a new website can easily be created in a short time frame. Those templates are off the shelf and ready to go. They can be customized in terms of colors, logos and content. There are also ready-made real estate plugins that can instantly add maps, school data, home price charts, recent property sales data, etc.

Working with an experienced developer with existing real estate themes and plugins is certainly better than going through the process of programming an entirely new website from scratch (which can sometimes be as excruciating and time-consuming as building a new home).

The reality of communicating with home buying and selling clients in the 21st century should be very obvious. Just walk into any coffee shop, look at people taking a break outside, or watch people in their offices – they are all interacting with their mobile devices. Think hard about making your website perform like a superstar electric car this year.