Real Estate Website Mobile Overhaul

For a real estate agent, the website is often the first thing a client sees, usually on a phone and often on a slow connection: in the car, between showings, or on the couch. If it's awkward to use or slow to load, people leave before they find the home search or the contact details.

The agent's site looked good on a desktop, but it wasn't yet tuned for phones. Photos were downloaded at full desktop size even on a small screen, about 1.2 MB of images for a single page. Some text was too small to read comfortably, the layout shifted slightly as the page loaded, and missing pages didn't return a proper "not found", which sends search engines mixed signals.

We measured first. The live site was tested as a mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection, recording how long the main content took to appear, how much the layout shifted, what was downloaded, and whether any text was too small to read or any element pushed the page sideways.

Images were the biggest win. Each photo is now delivered at the size it's actually shown, compressed, and photos further down the page load only when the visitor scrolls to them. A phone now downloads 130 KB of images for the whole page instead of about 1.2 MB, and a desktop 316 KB.

Then we made it work like a phone site. The header and menu adapt at every screen width, the home search opens full screen on a phone, keyboard focus is handled properly, and every piece of text is at least 12 pixels. Space is reserved for images before they load, so the layout stays still.

Finally, the technical basics. Unknown addresses now return a real "not found". Site styles are cached by the browser for a year, while the page itself is checked for updates on every visit, so returning visitors load quickly and always see the latest version.