RealEstateWebmasters.com officially the fastest website in the world!

Today is a HUGE day for us here at Real Estate Webmasters Inc

We’ve achieved a milestone in web development that no other company or platform has ever achieved.

A perfect 800!

Mobile: 100 / 100 / 100 / 100
Desktop: 100 / 100 / 100 / 100

In my 20+ years doing this (and since these metrics came out) I am yet to see another website (in any industry not just real estate) that has achieved perfect scores across all categories. And we’ve looked!

This is a huge accomplishment for the REW development team, and I can’t say enough about how proud I am to work with these ridiculously passionate, brilliant (and patient) teams.

How did we do it? Renaissance + Agency (our secret sauce)

As you probably already know, we spent years perfecting Renaissance and fine-tuning it’s performance. It is now at the point that was already the world’s fastest out of the box website framework (default scores below).

Renaissance Mobile:

Renaissance Desktop:

So it’s already ridiculously fast! (And accessible, and follows best practices and best for SEO).

But the reality is - that’s in a demo environment. Still amazing… but!

Scores do tend to change once customers start loading their site up with content.

Why? Because it’s not just the framework that needs to be fast. You need to also figure out a way to optimize and balance all of the content you’re adding as well. It is no easy task!

Especially in our case, where we have certain programmatic elements that are dynamic and connect other parts of the site and other software (like how we have a custom tag-based feed of our latest community posts on our home page).

And of course, there is the kicker. Third-party tracking scripts (like Google Tag manager) which while they have nothing to do with your code, they do still impact your final page speed score.

Tricky right? I know!

But I got it in my head that we were going to push. We were going to achieve what no company (even ourselves) has ever done. A perfect 800!

And today, we achieved that milestone!

We are officially the fastest, most accessible, most SEO friendly, best practicing following website company on the entire planet!

This was no easy task (our total project revamp was over 1,000 hours) we likely spent well over 100 on just the WPO alone.

I am so proud of this team and their hard work.

We learned so much from this process (and invented some new techniques/code that we will of course bring back to make Renaissance even better).

I can’t wait to see how Google responds to this update, and more importantly how our users feel about the drastic improvements in performance.

Now it’s time for phase 2! Content revamp! Let’s do this!!!

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And just for some context (and because it’s fun)

Here are the scores for Google.com and some other blue chip websites / brands

Google.com mobile:

Google.com Desktop

Forbes.com mobile

Forbes.com Desktop

Inman.com mobile

Inman.com Desktop

Zillow.com mobile

Zillow.com desktop

Congrats…This is really epic. Take my money! This is why I love working with REW, we share the principles of constant improvement. Asides from domain age, I know load speed is why some older sites in my market still outrank me even though they have no or terrible content as the page itself is just super fast to load because it is only an IDX feed.

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Hey @EvanHarlow - I’ll give you a call to chat more about WPO!

Way to go!!

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Haha sure! (But I’d rather not take too much)

I actually posted a follow up to this (since I know lots of folks will be asking)

Here it is How to increase your page speed (WPO), Accessibility and Technical SEO on Renaissance

On that thread, it addresses the key issues most folks face (and where to look to start fixing them)

That way, for those that are DIY or want to save some $, you can take on a lot of the challenges yourself.

But of course, if you do want it done fast, and at the highest level (and you don’t have time to learn/do this) then by all means reach out to your AM @JayPhee and he’ll hook you up.

Pro tip - if you have a customized Renaissance that is a few versions behind, it’s better to upgrade your Renaissance (and backend) first, since many new enhancements automatically go into that upgrade. (Example WEBP option everywhere)