Congratulations! Your estate agency website that you’ve been working on has gone live. But having a top website doesn’t stop there. In this post we’ll look at what you can do to improve it going forward.
Getting a website live is a proud moment for any business owner. All of them hours that you put into design, content and imagery has all now been made worth it as the public start to use your site.
Now that you’ve put all of that time into getting the site live, it would be a shame to now stop working on it and make your hard work go to waste. To achieve a top site there are numerous things you can do, short-term and long-term, to continuously make improvements.
Short-Term
Resolve any thing that you put off
When building a site there are often things left on your to-do list that you think to yourself “I’ll do that once it’s live”. Whether it’s replacing an image you’re not happy with, or adding extra functionality, now is the time to do it whilst the site is still fresh in your mind and high on your agenda.
Test
Of course you would’ve given your site a thorough test before it went live, but doing it again once the site is live is good practice. Ensure enquiries sent via any contact forms are received, that analytics is tracking visitors, that it looks ok on all devices, and that the property search functionality works as it should.
Testing the pagespeed is also a good idea at this time. If the development site and live site are on different servers the loading times might have changed.
Redirect Old URL’s
URL’s on the old website that had been indexed by search engines might now point users to a 404 page if the URL no longer exists. For some pages this is ok, but for others where there is a new equivalent of the same page but with a different URL you should add 301 redirects so users get redirected accordingly.
Our favourite WordPress plugin for easily setting up redirects is Simple 301 Redirects.
Let Everyone Know About Your New Website
Announce your new website to the world via as many mediums as possible. Share it on social media, and send out a newsletter to your mailing list (you do have a mailing list, right?).
This is also a good opportunity to ask people for feedback and to gauge people’s opinion of the new site.
Long Term
Blog
Blogging is crucial for any website. We wrote a case study a few years ago that looked at the improvement in traffic to a website, just by blogging once a week.
Keep WordPress and Plugins Updated
Check at regular intervals that you’re running the latest version of WordPress and any installed plugins. This’ll ensure you’re not only receiving the latest features, but also the latest security patches to keep your website secure.
Monitor Analytics
Over time you’ll be able to build a picture of how your visitors are using your website, how long they’re staying on a page, and the bounce rate. You can then look to make changes to improve these stats. We previously wrote a guide before on how to reduce bounce rate.
If your estate agency website has just gone live, or is due to go live soon, we hope the above prove to be useful steps.
