Home builder web design is arguably the most important part of your marketing strategy. Often the first opportunity you have to make an impression on potential home buyers, a well-designed website is a reflection of your company and will resonate with your customers.
What does your website need to drive conversions and strong sales? There are three key elements every home builder website should address: create a full customer journey by ensuring optimized website performance, engaging website content, and an emphasis on home buyer preferences.
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Salesforce Research – State of the Connected Consumer, 3rd Edition
1. Optimized Website Performance
Engaging potential buyers from their first click is imperative. The best home builder websites utilize website platforms designed specifically around the unique needs of home buyers, work quickly, are well maintained, and accessible to everyone.
Home Builder Website Platform
Shopping for a home is a unique buying journey. Provide a solid foundation for your digital presence by building your website on a platform specifically designed for home builders that is optimized for the way home buyers prefer to shop for homes.
These platforms will provide a structure to support your community, plan and home inventory data, and easily integrate with third-party listing sites and apps, CRMs and more to provide a seamless user experience.
Responsive Design
A home builder’s website typically gets 60-70% of its traffic from mobile devices. For the best user experience, create a website with a clean design that performs well on both mobile and desktop devices and complies with website accessibility standards. This is one of Google’s search engine ranking factors and is also important for your SEO.
Mobile design and testing is an area often overlooked as we tend to view the website while at work using a desktop or laptop, but don’t forget to test everything from your mobile device. Pay careful attention to the call to action buttons and links to ensure they are present and usable on mobile.
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Source: Blue Tangerine
Speed
A website with pages that load quickly is crucial to selling homes online. Evaluate your page speed on both mobile and desktop and make adjustments to optimize page load time. One of the most common causes of slower page speed is due to image file size. If you’re loading your images at full size without optimizing them for web viewing, they are likely larger than needed and slowing your website down. Optimizing image size is a step you can take immediately.
Other common reasons for a slower website are more technical, like adjusting code to minimize JavaScript or leveraging browser cache. For these types of optimizations, you may require professionals like Blue Tangerine’s website development team to make necessary changes.
How do you know if website speed is an issue? Here are a few page speed tools you can use to evaluate your website:
- Google PageSpeed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- Pingdom Website Speed Test: https://tools.pingdom.com/
- GT Metrix Page Speed Test: https://gtmetrix.com/
Well-Maintained
The best websites are always evolving. Perform regular maintenance on your website to keep it running smoothly, update fresh content, and maximize performance and sales. Whether it is due to changes in technology or changes in your business, a website is never truly “done”.
Here are a few ways you can make sure you have a plan in place to maintain and evolve your website:
- Set up a weekly testing schedule to ensure that the user experience from browsing to interactions with maps, community and home information, and lead forms are functioning.
- Review your website analytics or recording and heatmapping tools to assess the website engagement and conversion rate and spot potential pages that need to be optimized.
- Develop a website roadmap, outlining monthly content additions and functionality updates to keep your website updates on track.
Website Accessibility
Implement accommodations on your website to make it equally accessible to those with and without disabilities. Not only does the law require you to have an ADA-compliant website, but doing so improves your search engine optimization and increases your reach, maximizing your potential for leads. With the rise in claims for websites not meeting accessibility standards, and to provide inclusiveness for the disabled community, you should make website accessibility a top priority. Learn how to make your website accessible in this blog post.
2. Engaging Website Content
Every home builder website needs to create engagement and build connections with potential buyers in order to maximize sales potential. This is done by providing content that is fresh, visually appealing, educational, and builds trust in you as a builder.
Guide the Home Buyer
Educate visitors to your website about all aspects of the home buying process. If a buyer is looking at homes on your site but cannot find answers to their questions they will leave and find them somewhere else, and there is no guarantee they will come back. A wealth of information on your website demonstrates your home building expertise and provides transparency.
Visuals
Use stunning photography, virtual tours, and renderings to showcase your homes to everyone that visits your website. Strong visuals allow potential home buyers to imagine themselves in the space, creating emotional connections that bridge the gap between house and home for potential buyers.
Interactive Features
Utilize interactive site maps and floor plans to allow your customers to easily see which homes meet their needs, where those homes are available, and key details such as available options and pricing.
Create Trust
Display client testimonials and reviews on your website. 2021 Google My Business statistics found 84% of online consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations. Reading the experiences of satisfied customers alongside the visual evidence of your work will strengthen your business’s credibility.
3. Emphasis on Home Buyer Preferences
Home buyers have different preferences when it comes to purchasing a new home. How do you know what those are, and how do you create a website that doesn’t alienate different types of buyers? The best home builder websites provide the opportunity to communicate and connect with your sales team for in-person service as well as the ability to complete business transactions online.
Communication Preferences
Provide multiple avenues of communication for potential buyers from the moment they visit your website all the way through closing. The call to action to contact you to take the next step in their buying journey should be clear and prominent (Schedule a Tour, Visit this Community, Contact Us, etc). Online Sales Counselors can provide real-time support to website visitors via online chat and through quick responses to email and text inquiries, answering questions and nurturing interest to create qualified leads they can guide to your sales team.
Online Buying Support
Incorporate financial tools that allow buyers to reserve lots, submit a mortgage application, and finalize contracts through your website. Keeping everything in one place simplifies the process for your customers. When you begin to incorporate financial tools into your website you must also ensure your data privacy policies and procedures are up to date and data security is in compliance. Personal data security is essential to any home builder website and builds trust with your customers.
Keeping these three essential elements for your home builder website top of mind will provide a strong foundation for success. Remember that along with your marketing strategy, your website should be continuously evolving to maximize its effectiveness at connecting with your potential buyers.
For help in drafting a plan for your website and marketing strategy, connect with the Blue Tangerine team.
