WhoshouldIsee Tracks

I feel the need, the need for speed

Is your website fast enough? Or are your competitors racing ahead?

Homeflow sites own the market when it comes to blazingly fast page speed, considerably outperforming other agency website providers.

Our sites leave others behind because the Homeflow technological platform, upon which all our websites are built, is constantly optimised for speed. With a Homeflow website, your loading times don’t begin to slow down after a year or two, forcing you to rebuild from scratch. Instead, our websites stay in the fast lane year after year.

Site speed is probably the most overlooked ingredient in estate agency website design.  However, because it’s an “invisible factor” it’s easy to overlook the full significance of this factor and forget to insist on it during your website build or ongoing operations.

In today’s impatient world, website speed matters. No one wants to wait for a page to load – even five seconds can feel forever.

No doubt you’ve felt this yourself: “Ugh, this is a slow site, I’m out of here!”.  Whereas fast sites reward users clicking on them, to the point the user starts to feel (subconsciously) that they can “click on that next link” as there’s “no cost”.  Faster sites get more page impressions per session, period.  So users find more properties, make more enquiries, read more articles, and register more often.

In a nutshell, if you have a fast site, customers will browse and potentially get in touch. A slow site increases the chances of customers leaving your site and choosing another agency.

Google also cares about site speed – it’s a key factor in the SEO ranking algorithm. So a fast site moves you up the Google search rankings.

When you are a large agency group trying to optimise for 1000s of concurrent visitors, you need to use techniques like “caching” (pre-preparing web pages, or parts of web pages, so you can serve them instantly in a Blue Peter-like “here’s one we prepared earlier” move), content delivery networks (that push the pages and images down the network to a more local server in your local exchange), and even look to deploy ultra-fast non-sql databases like MongoDB.  However speed is every bit as important for the competitive single branch independents – so you should be seeking blisteringly fast page serving whatever your size.

Want to check out your site speed? Ask us – we can give you your current Google speed stats, and let you know how you compare to agencies of a similar size.

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