What you MUST install on your Website if you are a Real Estate Agent! Even through these directions, at first glance may appear daunting, following these instructions to install these plugins to your Real Estate website will only take you about 5 minute. I guarantee you are about to impress yourself! =)
First, it is correctly Plugins or Plugin, one simple word that gives your website individualized and special powers. Not Plug ins. I see people refer them correctly, but often see them called Plug ins, Plug-ins, and plug-in. You will become increasingly familiar and grateful for these little gifts, that we lovingly refer to as Plugins!
So far, you have purchased an inexpensive Hosting Account and selected a domain name, and installed WordPress and installed a Theme. Now you are ready to start really putting things together for a simple yet impressive Real Estate website where you have complete control! You are just going to flip out when you see how easy it is to build your own real estate website! You are going to kick yourself for spending so much money on your previous websites, but you are not alone. Fear alone stops Real Estate Agents from taking their website into their own hands. Even if you have no technical experience, you can do this with me.
Let me introduce you to the “Dashboard.” The dashboard is the back office area of your website that is not visible to the public. Go to Yourwebsite.com/wp-admin and login with your WordPress User Name and Password.
Look down the left side of the screen until you see “Plugins” and click. It will bring up any existing plugins. Click the “Add New” button near the top of the screen. You will see a search button, type in the following Plugin names. They will populate and you can click the “Install Now” button.
You will repeat the Plugin search and activating for all of the below Plugins. These are all my favorite Plugins that I use on my own Real Estate Website, after trying countless plugins that were less powerful. Plugins evolve by the day as developers identify needs in the marketplace. These are the best Plugins and they are FREE FREE FREE! I will describe these Plugins to you, but honestly, it doesn’t really matter what they do, so don’t stress over trying to remember.
These Real Estate website plugins are all free, but I would encourage you to donate to any of the developers if you are so inclined. Also, some of these free Plugins have paid versions so you could opt to show your support by upgrading to a professional paid version. Trust me though, you will find the free versions of all of these plugins sophisticated enough to build a very impressive and functional Real Estate website.
- “Elementor” This is a plugin that helps you design your site on the front end. It is truly magical, and trust me, I have tested soooooo many wordpress editing plugins, but this one takes the cake, hands down.
- “Page Templater For Elementor. This is an extension of Elementor that was built by a different developer to expand on Elementors capabilities.
- “Elementor Addons & Widgets.” This is yet another extension of Elementor that was built by another developer taking its usefulness to the next level.
- “Ninja Forms Styler.” This is an awesome program that allows you to easily build forms that site visitors can complete and submit to whatever email address you select.
- “TinyMCE Advanced.” This Plugin works when you are editing with wordpress, on the backend of your real estate website (WordPress dashboard).
- “Social Share WordPress Plugin.” This plugin allows you to have Share Buttons on any of your pages or posts on your website. This will help a visitor share your listings or share your blog posts, which is always really nice.
- “Title Remover.” This Plugin allows you to hide a Title. Titles are soooo 2017!
- “WP-Optimize.” This helps clean up your real estate website database and optimize your images.
- “Autoptimize,” This optimizes your Real Estate Website by compressing CSS and Javascript code. Gosh, I just got bored writing this description, yawn!
- “Duplicate Post,” This allows you to clone pages or posts. This can be helpful in entering new Real Estate Listings, or for Real Estate Agent Pages, where you can save time by duplicating another page or post, rather than starting from scratch.
Now that you have installed all of my recommended programs above, it is now time to Activate them. Click “Plugins” and you will see a checkbox you can click on the left side of all of the Plugin names. Go ahead and click each checkbox and select under “Bulk Actions,” then select “Activate.” WordPress will automatically let you know when all of Real Estate Plugins of 2018 have been installed onto your site. Unbelievably easy so far, right?!
Now let’s go take these Real Estate website Plugins for a spin! Let’s create a Featured Listing Page to get you started. On the left side of the screen you will click on “Pages” then select “Add New,” Name the Page “Featured Listings.” Click “Edit with Elementor” which takes you to the front end of the site. . Over on the left side, you will see the front end editor. Drag and drop “Columns” into the “Add New Section” area of the page. Now you can move the columns to be the width you prefer. Drag and Drop the Header into the Column on the left. Enter “Featured Listings” under where it gives you a space to add a Title. Click “Style” at the top of the Editor and Select a text color. Click “content” to change the text alignment.
Go ahead and explore around with all of the different things you can drag and drop to a page! Whatever you do, you can undo or delete. If you want to delete any of the widgets you have dragged and dropped onto your wordpress page, if you go over the section on the page, you will see a blue square highlighted. It will give you options to delete, to duplicate, to save a section.
Just drag and drop and drag and drop some more. Get yourself familiar with all of the different capabilities you can enjoy with this beautiful Real Estate Website with all of the best Plugins I have found for 2018. I am working on a video showing people how to build their own Real Estate Website on WordPress, I suggest watching that (when I get it done!).
