When it comes to designing and building a real estate website the idea of doing it yourself can be incredibly tempting. Right off the bat, the process seems deceptively easy. Register a domain, choose the right website builder, upload a few pictures, and write a few blogs. How hard can it really be?
Compared to the investment they need to make to get their website professionally designed, the couple of hundred dollars it takes to build a website themselves seems like argument enough.
However, even though there are clear benefits to building a website yourself and WordPress for realtors has made the process significantly easier, there are caveats.
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DIYing your real estate website: smart move or a costly mistake?
There’s a lot to consider when choosing between building your website yourself and using a professional web design service.
To give you a clearer picture of what designing and building your website entails, here are the biggest pros and cons of DIYing your real estate website.
DIY Website Pros
- You spend less money. Designing and building your own website will save you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars compared to outsourcing to a professional. However, if your website becomes outdated, doesn’t perform well, or has bugs you can’t fix, it could cost you even more money in the long run.
- You have complete creative control. You can decide on everything from color schemes to homepage layouts, and get to build your website exactly how you envisioned it from the start.
- You work on your own schedule. You get to work at your own pace and prioritize the aspects of your website that are most important to you. Making changes and editing your marketing content is also much faster when you’re doing it yourself.
- You know your business best. No one knows your brand better than you do. Building your own website means you can ensure every part of your site reflects your brand and business image perfectly.
- You know exactly what you’re getting. By building your own website you never have to worry about something not turning out the way you wanted it to or a designer not fully understanding your vision. You are in control of the entire design process, so you always know exactly what you’re getting and what your website will look like.
DIY Website Cons
- It’s going to take a lot of time. As a real estate agent, you probably spend a lot of your workday showing listings and networking with potential clients. As a result, you likely don’t have a large portion of your day to devote to building your website. Even with an hour a day, you’ll be looking at weeks or months before your website is ready to go live.
- There’s a steep learning curve. Designing a great real estate website takes much more than choosing and customizing a theme. IDX integration, implementing SEO, creating lead-capturing tools, adding plug-ins, and uploading high-quality media are just some of the things you’ll have to do to build a successful website. Doing this yourself means researching and following endless online tutorials, all of which can quickly become time-consuming and frustrating.
- You can’t keep track of it all. Websites have a lot of moving parts. Keeping track of all of them, ensuring they work properly, and that they’re optimized for your website can take a lot of time and effort.
- There’s very little technical support. Although website builders offer customer support, few offer comprehensive support and fixes for bugs or website updates that could interrupt your website’s accessibility.
- You have to regularly update your site. Security updates, new SEO guidelines, changes in Google Analytics, and website trends change all the time. Keeping on top of everything that needs to be updated will either take up a large part of your time, or you’ll be left with an outdated website that doesn’t draw as much traffic as it used to.
The key to making building your website as easy as possible is choosing the right content management system (CMS), and one of the best available for DIYing a real estate website is WordPress.
The truth about WordPress
More than 43% of all the websites on the internet are built with WordPress, which makes it a popular choice for real estate agents looking to build their own sites.
Some of WordPress’ most acclaimed, sought-after features for real estate websites include:
- User-friendly interface. It’s easy to learn the basics of WordPress and use that knowledge to build a great website without any coding experience.
- Hundreds of real estate plugins. There are hundreds of real estate plugins to choose from when building your website, including IDX plugins and calculators for things like amortization or monthly mortgage repayments.
- Built-in SEO solutions. WordPress started as a blogging platform, so it makes sense that SEO is one of its strong points. Today, WordPress offers built-in solutions for SEO across both the back and front ends.
- Top-notch security. WordPress prioritizes safety and has strong protections in place to counteract cyber attacks and flag spam.
- Full site ownership. By creating a website on WordPress, you get complete ownership of your site and all the content you upload to it.
The advantages of using WordPress for realtors over alternative CMS platforms like Squarespace and Wix are obvious. However, that doesn’t mean WordPress has no limitations.
Some of the biggest issues real estate agents building a website with WordPress encounter are:
- Constant updates and upgrades. Every theme and plugin you install on your WordPress site will probably need to be updated on a regular basis. Doing this yourself while solving compatibility issues can be a tedious process.
- Vulnerability to security breaches. As an open-source CMS, WordPress is particularly vulnerable to hacking and other security breaches. Even though WordPress does a great job at working against these issues, its security is not completely impenetrable, which leaves websites using WordPress open to unexpected attacks.
- Customization challenges. WordPress offers limitless customization opportunities. However, taking advantage of these opportunities means having an in-depth, working knowledge of WordPress themes and plugins, something few real estate agents are experts in.
Considering these challenges, it’s not surprising that a professionally developed website is still the preferred option among luxury real estate agents.
The benefits of a professionally developed website
Working with a professional website design company leaves you free to focus on the parts of your business that can’t thrive without you, like networking, building customer relationships, and referral partnerships.
Luxury Presence is a full-service website design and content creation company that understands the importance of a real estate agent’s online presence and the care that needs to be taken when building their website.
On top of industry-leading website designs, Luxury Presence also offers its clients access to Presence™️, a CMS platform that allows agents to make changes to their websites themselves in collaboration with highly experienced website designers.
As one of the best professional website development firms in the real estate industry, Luxury Presence’s CMS gives you access to a range of powerful features such as:
- Beautiful design options. With Luxury Presence, you can smoothly adjust your website’s layout, branding styles, and color schemes with the touch of a button. The platform also includes an easy-to-use visual website editor and unlimited access to stunning, high-quality images and media to make your site your own.
- Mobile-friendly editing capabilities. Presence™️ allows agents to make edits to their websites from their phones, so you don’t have to wait to get to your office to make urgent changes or additions.
- User-friendly interface. Forget complicated tutorials and going through hundreds of setting tabs to find the element you want to edit. With Presence™️ you can access an easy-to-use website builder that doesn’t require reading a novel-length guide to understand.
- Cutting-edge analytics reporting. To help you understand what’s working for your website and what isn’t, Presence™️ includes access to smart website analytics that offer integrations with top CRMs so you can keep track of how your clients respond to your site and how to improve it with just one click.
FAQs
Is WordPress good for realtors?
WordPress is a great choice for realtors looking to create their very first website themselves or those who want to keep their website simple and functional. For more complex, market-driven designs, it’s better to use a professional website-building company.
What is CMS in real estate?
A content management system (CMS) is a platform or software that lets real estate agents create, manage, and change content on their websites without knowing how to code.
What are the limitations of WordPress?
Despite its many benefits, WordPress has significant limitations including:
- Complex customization challenges that require in-depth knowledge of the platform
- Vulnerability to security breaches and cyber attacks
- The need to constantly upgrade and update plugins that eventually may become incompatible with each other or your website
