Broker Marketing: Keep it Quick

Broker Cafe
Published: 06/19/2012
Posted by: RET Staff

You only have a few seconds after a potential client clicks on a link to your site to convince him to stay. During those critical seconds a couple of things need to happen. Your page must begin to load and it must display something of interest to the visitor. Today we’ll focus on the quick load issue.

We’ve all visited a website that took forever to load. If you arrived at a slow website by way of a search engine, odds are that you will hit the back button without waiting to see what would have been displayed. This is the Internet equivalent of channel surfing during the commercials. It is important that your website load quickly demonstrating the value it offers to the visitor during the critical first few of seconds.

Why do some websites load so slowly? The answer is usually poor design decisions.

1) Lots of Poorly Optimized Images
Big graphics files take time to download. If your website is slow to load, the first thing to do is have your web designer re-optimize the graphics. Sometimes during the design to deploy process of building a new website, the designer will forget to optimize the graphics.

2) Slow Data Access
Many websites uses a database to recognize returning visitors (“welcome back Steve") or perhaps the site displays a featured listing which pulls data from a listing service. If the page is not designed to fail gracefully, any external data service can cripple your page load time. Generally, these data calls can be moved to the bottom of the HTML code. This will allow the majority of your content to be displayed while the slower data call is happening in the background.