Making your Real Estate Website Stand Out From Big Agency Sites

The majority of the world has gone virtual now due to the coronavirus pandemic. I've had a lot of real estate professionals contact me for websites and it surprised me during these tough times. But it makes sense that it's important to establish an online presence.

This post is to outline how I can help make your real estate website stand out without providing advice on the typical "use high-quality photos", or "Write valuable content". Instead, I'm going to dive into the back end of the website and make it different from the inside than appearance.

Websites from the big players

There are so many real estate websites out there that are built by big agencies such as Agent Image and [Luxury Presence](). They are big players in web design for the real estate industry and I have to admit, their designs are outstanding.

There is just one thing they have in common for their web design. It both runs on a database. But don't you need a database to have a fully functioning website?! Nope.

Some of their sites are built using WordPress which I am not a fan of. I won't get into it in this post but if you're curious, read it here.

Technical vs Design

Anybody can create a beautiful design and a great design can be visually appealing to different people. But how can we make a real estate website stand out from the millions of other real estate websites? let's get technical…

Enter JAMstack

JAMstack is the new modern way of web development. Note the word development instead of design. While most web designers rely on website builders such as Wix, Squarespace, and [WordPress](). JAMstack developers code from the ground up.

Is it more time-consuming? Sometimes… it really depends on the experience of the developer. But why is this better? JAMstack provides better performance, security, better scaling, and better experience for us developers and programmers. We also have control of what resources the website uses so there is no bloat to the website to slow it down.

Let's make your site stand out

1. Eliminating Database: By eliminating this one thing, your site will already pick up in load time that no website with the database can beat. While the majority of traditional websites run on a database, I focus on building a fully static website that loads from the CDN. This leads to the next topic.
2. CDN Delivery: Your JAMstack website will be served over a CDN with pre-built files. This helps in load time tremendously.
3. Maintainability: I think we all know the downside to hosting websites. Especially with shared servers. All of the hosting complexity is reduced by just eliminating the servers and load the client over CDN. So you can sleep peacefully knowing your website won't be affected by other sites on a shared server.
4. Security: Security is a big thing especially if you're collecting information from your visitors. Luckily a JAMstack websites serve pre-generated files which is essentially read-only, in return reduces attacks and database injections that can corrupt your data.

It's not all about design

Picking out your next website is tough, especially when most agencies focus on providing the same website structure. Here, I try to make my websites different by switching everyone to the JAMstack route, while most websites are still using WordPress and website builders. Contact me and let's see what I can do to help.