Maintenance Tips for Real Estate Digital Marketers
For real estate digital marketers, maintaining their website is a crucial factor to generate quality leads. A well-maintained website will help in improving the website’s load time, search engine ranking, and user interface, resulting in more traffic and better conversions. With so many real estate digital marketing strategies revolving around a website, it is necessary to keep it up-to-date and free from errors. We’ve put together some WordPress specific maintenance tips that can help you keep your website in top shape so it will continue to generate quality leads.
Regular Backups and Updates
Backing up your website and keeping your WordPress core, plugins, and themes up-to-date is the first step. This will ensure that your website is running on the latest release. Updates usually add additional bug fixes, and more importantly, vulnerability patches. WordPress has automatic plugin update options, but rolling back to a previous update can be tricky. Regular backups can save you from potential data loss if something ever does go wrong, but can also be used to restore your site to a point in time where it was working.
Websites hosted by STAFFLINK are updated in real time. As soon as a plugin is available, our websites automatically download and install the latest version. To go further, websites built by us are developed, deployed, updated, and controlled via Composer. (if you’re not into dev, don’t bother with the link, it’ll put you to sleep!) Composer allows us to set specific versions for every piece of software your website has. Sometimes, a plugin may introduce breaking changes, which could cause visual regression, or worse, a completely broken site.
To go even further, full site backups can be restored with a single click. In the ultimate worst case scenario where a server fails, we have daily server backups that can be restored in yep, you guessed it! One click…if you exclude the single sign on process and navigating to the dashboard!
Website Speed / Load Times
Slow load times are a major contributor to a high bounce rate of your website. A high bounce rate can damage your Google search ranking and make your site less likely to be found. We recommend using free tools available like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom, and testing regularly. If your website speed is slow, you can use website caching and reduce image sizes to increase speed. There are plenty of free plugin options, but caching at the server level is best. Our hosting options utilise Redis cache. Redis stores database queries in the servers’ memory, which is significantly faster than accessing the database for every property search.
Monitor SEO and Website Security
Search engine optimization is the foundation of any digital marketing strategy. Apart from website speed, search engine ranking depends on various factors such as website indexing, broken links, or missing alt tags. Regularly monitor your website’s SEO and make the necessary changes to improve it. Additionally, use a security plugin like WordFence. It will limit bots from spamming your site. If you’re struggling to keep spam out of your inbox, install Akismet. It compares every submission against a database of spam, and automatically filters out anything that matches spam in their database.
If you’re not too sure on how to handle security, sign up to our Site Care, and let us do it for you. If you still can’t get anywhere near the top of Google for your chosen keywords (or don’t know what the hell a keyword is, or what to rank for) we can schedule a monthly report, so all you need to do is create the content. Leave the rest to us.
Mobile Responsiveness
This one is pretty obvious, but 70% of traffic to real estate websites are on mobile devices. If your site doesn’t work on mobile, your SEO will be punished, and your users will go somewhere else. Test your website’s performance on different mobile devices and screen sizes, and optimise it accordingly. In a lot of cases, you’ll need a developer to fix issues caused by updates, or if your theme isn’t up to scratch. We can help with that too! Get in touch, and we can support your development with a monthly retainer.
Lead Capture
Finally, if you don’t have easily accessible forms and contact details, there’s no point in having a website. It’s really that simple. Having clear calls to action (buttons to do something, basically) to contact your team can significantly increase your conversion rate. Ensure that your forms are easily visible on your website and capture only necessary information.
WordPress maintenance is an ongoing process that requires regular attention and effort. Keep your website updated, and you’ll most likely generate more leads. A well-maintained website translates to better search engine ranking, more traffic, and increased conversions. Digital marketers in the real estate industry need to prioritise website maintenance so your marketing strategy has a solid foundation.
Starting a new business, need a refresh, or just want more leads? We build websites, and can put together a goals driven strategy for your agency.
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