The main Hondon Villas website : www.hondonvillas.net, consistently gets a site performance score between 90 to 100 out of 100 from Google (the only search engine worth using). We passed all 20 audit points on our laptop version of the site. [ @ May 2020 ]
Why does that matter? It’s actually very important to us, to Google and to you, the end-user (buyer/seller). Please read on (I try to keep the jargon out).
Property finders, like you, are frequently online using websites to find properties. You visit many sites looking for that dream home. You may look at 100’s or 1000’s of houses across different real Estate agent’s websites. So you’ll know that getting information quickly is important and saves you time. So just saving say 10 seconds on a page load time can mount up over many websites. Speed is important, maybe you didn’t realise how much.
Have you ever just left a website because it was too slow?
Most of us have! As you use the Internet you will be aware of the speed at which websites load or the way they can be used. We all get frustrated from time to time if a website doesn’t work or is too slow to work. right? It happens a lot.
Hondon Villas has one of, if not the fastest and most visited website in the Hondon Valley. Google says we out-perform our main rival agents in the Hondon area (see graphic above).
Why is the HV website faster?
Well the website is bespoke , custom built from scratch by our pro’ trained in-house web developer with years of IT and Web experience with HSBC. Whilst it is not always perfect, he puts a lot of effort into making sure the site conforms to Google’s web building standards, like smartphone compliance, slim coding standards and faster load speeds. Our Google Page Speed score of 94 & 100 shows that work pays off.
It matters because user studies consistently show that people are very impatient and will literally only wait a few seconds for a web page to load or THEY LEAVE!
I bet you have done that right?
Our site has speed features built-in and contributes to why Hondon Villas website has ranked at Page#1 in search results for over 10 years. Faster sites get favoured by Google. Users like faster websites. We want the competitive edge.
As we have been established a long time, our website has evolved and improved. Our website has had over 2 million views and many visitors return to it. We know from user data what pages they like, the path they take and what devices they are using. We know if they “leave” quickly so we ask why and fix it. We regularly tweak the site to work better or fix issues as they crop up.
Other Agents buy “off-the-shelf” web packages
Most of our property rivals work from home and don’t have the budget, inclination, in-house skills to know about or to fix their website problems. They build blindly and forget. Well we monitor them, so does Google, so it’s not difficult to compare.
As you can imagine, it costs a lot more to build a custom site than to buy a template site like “WordPress” or similar “Bloatware”. These “off-the-shelf” website packages all suffer from the same thing: generic aesthetics over performance and of course they are very cheap and quick to utilise. They are inherently cloned to have bad coding, have slow speeds, are inflexible design-wise and more often than not, do not work too well on smartphones.
So buying a template website is not such a good idea in general. They may be paying for a website that is actually damaging its potential to gain or retain visitors. We think the Hondon Villas website has a competitive edge and that matters to both buyers and our vendors as they are more likely to find us in Google. Some of our competitors in the Hondon Valley are NOT highly ranked in Google like Hondon Villas are.
What affects a Website’s Performance?
Well there are many technical factors (too many to list here) that can affect a website’s performance such as the web servers or communication lines / satellites and of course your own device (laptop, tablet, smart phone) and of course your Internet provider’s performance or your location. Indeed some of the latest phones and mobile networks can be faster than home connections. But performance varies greatly, even from hour-to-hour or device-to-device. It is inherent in the “web”.
Not all websites are built the same:
The website itself can be to blame if it is built poorly or the web developer pays no attention to it’s performance. Indeed many site owner’s pick a web design purely on aesthetics and pay little, if any notice of its performance features (or lack of).
Google likes Fast Sites:
Google also knows and measures all sites and it has the user data to confirm what the user prefers. In fact, Google builds its main search engine results and site recommendations on the quality and date of a site’s content but also its speed. They even have tools to measure and monitor a website’s performance and usability. Advertisers also like fast popular websites. To re-iterate, faster websites get favoured by Google. Simple...
But not so simple to put right unless you have the time, budget, inclination and skills to do so.
Do you need help in buying / selling or more more info’?
Please feel free to visit our REAL ESTATE OFFICE in the Hondon de los Frailes Plaza (next to Restaurante 28). Or Email us: property [@] hondonvillas.net
