Sweet Home theme with IDX Speedy Widgets is Smokin’ Home
We are really excited about the free WordPress for real estate theme that we recently released called SweetHome. It is designed to be really easy to setup and we think that most people can watch the video the look over the setup guide and get the site setup in about 30 to 60 minutes.
We are offering it to everyone for free. You just need to activate your account at https://app.leadercrm.com to get the free download.
Hosting SweetHome with RealtyCandy
You also have the option to host with us.
When you do, we include 2 big free features:
1. Speedy IDX Widgets 2.0
2. IDX Broker Customization
Let’s take a look at both of these.
Speedy IDX Widgets 2.0
As many of you have noticed, when you add a bunch of IDX Broker widgets to your home page, your page will get really S L O W to load. There are a number of reasons for this, but basically the images are huge and with a bunch of them loading, there is a huge load on the server. That makes your page load slowly.
We have a solution!
Visit the demo site by clicking here.
When you use our Speedy IDX Widgets 2.0 IDX Addon, that loading speed will be greatly reduced. We are setting up a new site for a client at https://rcrobert.idxsecure.com. Here is the before and after Speedy IDX Widgets 2.0:
You can see that these two tests were taken just about 30 minutes apart. We setup the Speedy IDX Widgets tool, and then wait for about 15 minutes for our server to update, and voila!, the speed was slashed.
Total page size when from over 8MB to about 500k. That is 1/16th of the original page size.
The fully-loaded time is 1/3 of the original load time.
Signup here to setup your new site
Are these results that everyone is going to get?
Maybe not. We host this on our uber-fast server that is optimized for SweetHome and our themes. We also made sure that all of the images on the site are optimized.
We think that most of our clients can see a 50% reduction in page loading speed. That is really fast and really important for anyone using a mobile device.
How can you get your site roasting fast?
We think there are a few options.
- Use SweetHome WordPress real estate theme. We spent a lot of time and resources building a theme that is fast to setup and runs fast on the server. You can download it here for free: https://app.leadercrm.com/settings/download/themesYou can also purchase it setup and ready to go like the demo and hosted on our servers here: https://realtycandy.com/rc_themes/sweet-home-theme/
When you purchase the hosted version, we include the Speedy IDX Widgets IDX Add-on and the IDX Broker customization at no charge. - You can also add Speedy IDX Widgets to your existing site by going to https://realtycandy.com/rc_idx_addons/idx-speedy-widgets/ and getting signed up for IDX Addons
- We recommend that you use the TinyPNG WordPress plugin to optimize and resize your images. This is a common issue on most websites.
One last thing…
Another benefit of using the Speedy IDX Widgets tool, is that your SSL certificate will work. That means that when people use the https:// version of your site, they won’t get a warning because the images are not secure.
We include the SSL certificate with all our hosted sites. If you have a hosted site and you don’t have your SSL certificate setup, please contact us using the Contact Us page.
Setting up the Speedy IDX Widget tool
The Speedy IDX Widget tool is super fast and easy to setup. We know that you don’t want to spend a bunch of time making those IDX Broker widgets load fast, so we made a couple of quick spots that you just select the widget, set the image size and you are off to the races.
Check out these videos: