Last time we made the case that a real estate agent’s website is not for discovery — portals own that — but for conviction. Two-thirds of sellers arrive by referral, and a referral looks you up before they call.
Fair question in response: how do I know whether mine is any good?
So here is the audit, and you run it yourself. Ten checks, ten minutes, no tools, no signup, nobody to call. Every one has a number attached so you are not guessing.
The rules of the test
This matters more than the checks themselves. Do all of it:
- On your own phone. Not your laptop. Mobile is 68.5% of real estate website traffic.
- On mobile data, with wi-fi turned off. Your office wi-fi is not what your referral is standing on.
- In a private window. Otherwise you are testing your own cache, not your website.
You are trying to see what a stranger sees. That is harder than it sounds, because you know where everything is.
1. Time it
Cold start, private window, mobile data. Count out loud from the moment you tap until you can actually read something.
Pass: under 3 seconds. Good: under 2.
Past three seconds bounce rises about 38%. Past six, 67.2% of visitors leave — two out of three, gone before they saw your face. A single second of extra delay lifts bounce by roughly a third.
2. The three-second squint
Load the homepage, look for three seconds, then look away. Can you say who this person is, where they work, and what to do next?
Pass: all three.
The visitor arrived to check whether you are real. If the top of your site is a stock photo of a skyline and the words “Your Journey Home Begins Here”, you have answered none of the three questions they came with.
3. Tap your own phone number
Not read it. Tap it. Does the phone start dialling?
Pass: it dials.
A phone number typed as plain text is a phone number nobody calls from a phone.
It needs to be a real tel: link. This is the single most common failure on
agent sites and it takes about ninety seconds to fix.
4. Send yourself a message through your own contact form
Fill it in as a stranger would. Submit it. Then go and check whether it arrived — inbox and spam folder.
Pass: it arrives, within a minute, somewhere you actually look.
This is the check nobody runs and the one that costs the most. Forms break silently: a plugin update changes how mail is sent, or a forwarding address expires. The form still says thank you. The enquiries go nowhere and you conclude the market is quiet.
If you do only one thing from this list, do this one. Then do it again in three months.
5. The keyboard test
Tap the phone number field in your form. Does a number pad come up, or letters?
Pass: number pad.
Using the wrong input type cuts form completion by about 12%. It is one attribute in the HTML. Twelve percent of your enquiries for one attribute is the best return available anywhere on this list.
6. Count the fields
How many things must someone fill in before they can contact you?
Pass: four or fewer, on one screen.
Mobile forms already complete at 47.5% against 54.5% on desktop, and mobile abandonment runs about 65% higher — almost entirely input friction. Multi-step forms are worse again: 82.4% of people abandon them, and anything over four steps completes at 9.7%.
Name, phone, and one open box. You can ask the rest on the call.
7. Turn it sideways, then pinch
Rotate the phone. Now try to scroll horizontally on the homepage.
Pass: nothing moves sideways, and no text needs zooming to read.
Horizontal scroll means something is wider than the screen — usually a table, a map, or an image nobody sized. It reads as broken even to people who could not tell you why.
8. Google your own name, in a private window
Search your full name plus your city. Look at what comes back.
Pass: your own website is the first result.
If a Zillow or Realtor.com profile outranks your own site for your own name, you are paying a portal to intercept people who were specifically looking for you. That is the most winnable search in the world and the only one where you should expect to beat a portal outright.
9. Open your Google Business Profile
Is it claimed, complete, and does it have every neighbourhood you work in listed as a service area?
Pass: claimed, complete, service areas filled in, local phone number.
46% of Google searches have local intent, and businesses with complete profiles average around 50 calls a month straight from the listing. Incomplete profiles rank below complete ones, consistently.
Two things people get wrong: use a local area code, not a toll-free number, and use your actual business name. Stuffing it to “Best Real Estate Agent in [City]” risks suspension.
10. Find the newest thing on the site
Scroll until you find something with a date on it. How old is it?
Pass: something from the last ninety days.
A “2024 Market Outlook” sitting on your homepage in 2026 tells a visitor something you did not intend: that nobody is minding this. Sold listings still marked active do the same job. An empty blog is better than a stale one.
Score it honestly
| Failed checks | What it means |
|---|---|
| 0–2 | Fine. Fix them and move on — this is not where your problem is. |
| 3–5 | You are leaking. Referrals are arriving and some are quietly not converting. Worth a weekend. |
| 6+ | The site is working against you. Rebuilding is cheaper than patching, and probably cheaper than the commission you are losing. |
Be honest on check 4 especially. “It probably works” is not a pass.
What this does not measure
Worth saying, because a checklist can look more authoritative than it is.
None of these tell you whether your content is any good, and that is the part that increasingly decides things. Google’s AI Mode now answers the generic questions itself, so “5 tips for first-time buyers” is a dead page. What survives is the stuff only you could write: what actually sells on that street, what the HOA is really like, why that catchment moved. No audit measures that. It just makes sure people get to it.
And a fast website will not fix a weak referral network. The site converts the relationships you already have. It does not create them.
If three or more failed
Then you already know what we do.
We will rebuild it first, at no cost, and you pay only if you keep it. You see it live on a real URL, run these same ten checks on it yourself, and compare. If you do not want it, you owe nothing and we take it down — no invoice, no follow-up sequence.
The scope is one agent site — homepage, about, contact, and whatever listing integration your brokerage allows — written down before we start so we both know what finished means. Not unlimited free revisions, and we would rather say that now than discover it awkwardly later.
You can see finished examples on our demos page: a trades site and a fitness studio, both live, both openable on your phone right now. Run check 1 on them while you are there — that is the point of them.
If you are an agent in the US, Canada, Australia or Türkiye, send us your name and your market and we will build one.
Worst case, you get a free website you decide not to use.