The success of any real estate website lies on its ability to provide true and accurate data to their users. With the improvement in technology and the immense popularity of WordPress websites, the use of IDX plugins is the ultimate solution for real estate agents to remain competitive and meet all the needs of their users so that they can in turn grow as a business.
There are plenty of such plugins but not all of them have the capabilities to meet the unique demands of the modern day user as well as the ever changing landscapes of the real estate industry. The ideal IDX plugin should be able to meet the five core goals of any real estate agent and these include:
- Ability to generate quality real estate leads
- Legitimize you (the website owner) as a real professional
- Make you appear as an authority in the industry
- Grow your presence and influence in the web
- Make the website your home for internet marketing
Though you could choose from a number of plugins to help you achieve the above, the following are the top three and among the best in the industry. They are guaranteed to offer you with best results for your WordPress real estate website:
Showcase IDX
Showcase IDX is a reliable, beautiful and flexible IDX plugin for real estate websites. It comes will all the features necessary to give your WordPress real estate website the power it requires to adequately meet the entire needs of your clients. Some of the notable features of this plugin include:
10 Minutes MLS Refresh – the plugin updates all its listing data every ten minutes. This will ensure that your visitors are presented with the most recent property listings in your websites.
Advanced Search – it allows for advanced searches across multiple data fields to return more targeted and highly refined data.
Easy customization – gives you all the tools you need to further customize the plugin so that it is in tandem with the general design of your WordPress.
Mobile Friendly – The plugin is responsive and will render in mobile devices. With this, your real estate WordPress website will also be visible to users accessing the internet with mobile devices.
Lead Insights – With the Lead Insights, you are able to track your leads from the moment they got into the sight and see everything that they were looking for. With this information, you can further customize the content of the site to provide more useful information to the users.
Facebook Integration – Showcase IDX plugin has Facebook integration capabilities to enable your website users to log in into your site using their Facebook credentials and also to share your site with their friends.
The other cool features of Showcase IDX include email alerts, not set up fees, hotsheets to add you more flexibility, data export capabilities, Google Analytics, registration options and many more. With all these features, it is understandable why Showcase IDX is one of the top IDX plugins for real estate websites.
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IDXPress (Diverse Solutions)
IDXPress is another great plugin for WordPress real estate websites. This plugin essentially gives you the power to kill two birds with one stone. It has been designed and developed in such a way that it will it provide your users with the ability to search and browse the available real estate properties in your Multiple Listing Service (MLS). In addition to this, it will also allow the search engine robots to index every property from the MLS on your website. This is very advantageous considering the benefits of such indexing with regards to search engine optimization and organic traffic generation.
Some of the features made available by IDXpress include:
Easy installation process – the process of installing IDXpress plugin is simple and straightforward. All you have to do is to download it, install then activate it by inserting the Activation Key. You don’t need to have any knowledge of code or programming skills to get it running on your website.
Widgets and Shortcodes – the plugin comes with several widgets to give you the flexibility to create more dynamic content. The shortcodes on the other hand will let you have property details on any page or post you want.
Search Engine Optimization – the plugin uses semantically appropriate HTML hence it has less HTML bloat thus making it easy for the search engines to see and index all the pages. In addition to this, since the property from your MLS are indexed on your website, you end up getting good exposure in the search engines leading to more traffic.
Dynamic Content Page – perhaps this is the best feature of IDXpress plugin. It populates your website with dynamic content from your MLS. The benefit of this is that your users will have real time data whenever they search for real estate property in your website. This is not just good for your reputation as an agent but also it will enhance the user experience since it will be easy for them to find the properties they are interested in.
iHome Finder
iHome Finder is a gorgeous plugin that makes it a breeze for your users to search for real estate properties from your website. It is responsive hence will work across multiple browsers as well as mobile devices such as Smartphone and tablets. In addition to these, it offers superior search engine optimization capabilities with unmatched styling options. iHome Finder brings the following features to your real estate website:
- Fully responsive designs
- Quick set up and installation
- Flexible design options
- User friendly property search tools
- Interactive Map Search
- Eye Catching Galleries
- Innovative Facebook Apps
- Automated Featured Listings
- Superior Lead Capture Functionalities
Though you have the choice to use any other IDX plugin for your real estate website, the above are the top three in the industry at the moment and they are likely to give you the best performance. Try them out before moving to the next ones in the unlikely event that they never served your purposes.