How to make a real estate agent website, step by step

You can build a good agent website yourself. It is not hard, but it is a lot of small decisions, and the ones that matter (photos, forms, the footer) are not the ones the builders advertise. Here is the whole process in order. Budget a couple of weekends.

Step 1: Buy a domain

Your name, or your name plus “homes” or “realty,” as a .com if it is free. Skip clever spellings; people have to type this from a sign rider. Register it directly with a registrar (Cloudflare, Namecheap, Porkbun and Google’s successor Squarespace Domains are all fine) rather than through a builder, so it stays yours if you change builders later. Expect $10 to $20 a year. Turn on auto-renew today; expired agent domains are a small tragedy that happens constantly.

Step 2: Pick a builder

For DIY the realistic choices are Wix and Squarespace. Both host the site, handle the TLS certificate and give you a template editor. Wix has more real-estate-specific templates; Squarespace is cleaner and harder to make ugly. WordPress is more powerful and more work; unless you already know it, do not start there. Expect $16 to $35 a month on the plan that removes the builder’s branding and connects your domain.

The trap here is the “real estate” template category, which mostly means a stock photo of a kitchen and a fake search bar. You will be replacing all of it.

Step 3: Choose and strip the template

Pick the plainest template you can stand, then delete everything you will not fill with real content: the fake team page, the “our process” timeline, the Instagram feed widget, the parallax video header. Empty sections and lorem ipsum are what make DIY sites look DIY. A template with four honest sections beats one with twelve half-finished ones.

Step 4: Photos, resized and optimized

This step decides whether your site is fast or slow, and almost everyone skips it. A photo straight from a listing photographer is 4,000 to 6,000 pixels wide and three to eight megabytes. Twenty of those on a listings page is a site that takes fifteen seconds to load on a phone in a driveway.

1. Resize each photo to 1,600 pixels on the long side (2,000 for a hero image).
2. Export as JPEG at quality 75 to 80, or WebP if your builder accepts it.
3. Aim for under 250 KB per listing photo, under 400 KB for the hero.
4. Name the files sensibly: 412-maple-ave-kitchen.jpg, not IMG_8841.jpg.

Free tools that do this in bulk: Squoosh in the browser, or ImageOptim on a Mac. Do this for your headshot too. Plan on doing it again every time you list a home.

Step 5: The five pages every agent site needs

1. Home. Your name, a one-line tagline that says who you help and where, one featured listing, a short why-me paragraph, a testimonial, and a button to contact you. That is the whole page.
2. Listings. One card per property, active and sold, each opening to a page with a gallery, the facts, and an enquiry form for that specific home.
3. About. Written in first person, in your voice. How long you have done this, what kind of clients you work with, why. Two or three short paragraphs.
4. Areas. The neighborhoods and towns you actually work, each with a sentence or two of real local knowledge. This page is what Google ranks you for.
5. Contact. A form, your phone, your email, your brokerage office address. Nothing else.

Step 6: The contact form, and where enquiries go

A form that stores submissions in the builder’s dashboard is a form you will check once a week. Configure it to email you immediately, to the address you actually read on your phone, and check whether the builder sets the reply-to header to the sender’s email; if it does not, replying to the notification sends your answer to a no-reply address. Test it from a friend’s phone, not your own laptop. Then add a second, smaller form to every listing page (“Ask about this home”) so the enquiry tells you which property it is about.

If your builder supports it, add a one-field “get new listings first” sign-up. It is the lowest-pressure lead capture there is, and the list is yours.

Step 7: The broker disclosure footer

Your state licensing rules, and your brokerage’s policy, almost certainly require your brokerage name on every page, and usually its address and phone, your license number, and fair-housing and equal-opportunity language. Put all of it in the footer once, so it is on every page automatically. Ask your broker for the exact wording; they have a paragraph ready. Missing this is the most common compliance problem on self-built agent sites, and the easiest to fix.

Step 8: Speed

Run the finished site through Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile tab. If photos are optimized and you removed the widgets, a DIY site can land in the 70s or 80s. Below that, the culprits are almost always an oversized hero image, an embedded map or video, or a font pack with twelve weights. Google reads speed as quality, and so do buyers on a phone; a purpose-built platform can target 100/100, but 80 on a builder is respectable.

Step 9: Launch checklist

• Domain connected, https works, the www and non-www versions both load.
• Every page opened on a phone; nothing overflows sideways.
• Contact form and one listing form tested from a different device; email arrived; reply-to correct.
• Disclosure footer on every page, wording approved by your broker.
• No placeholder text, stock photos or empty sections anywhere.
• Page titles set for each page (“Homes in Maple Grove | Jane Smith, Realtor”).
• Site submitted in Google Search Console; sitemap found.
• Address updated on business cards, sign riders, email signature, Instagram bio, Zillow and brokerage profiles.

Time and cost per step

That is a fair deal if you enjoy the work and have the weekends. It is a bad deal if you would rather spend those hours prospecting, or if you know from experience the half-finished site will sit that way until spring. See what a realtor website costs for how DIY compares with the agent-specific platforms.

The five-minute version

Questions people ask