Faster Page Content Load Mechanism!
Major speed & load mechanism upgrades, auto-add to Mailchimp lists, and some user interface upgrades to make your website function better & easier to use!
More Speed Upgrades (Up to 3X)
Over the years our page content system was upgraded significantly to offer more functionalities – custom fields, attached main images & PDFs, excerpts, custom meta titles/descriptions and more! These processes tend to tack on top of each other as we build, and it was time for a major overhaul.
Without affecting front-end functionality, we managed to re-arrange the system so that the data retrieval takes a fraction of the time & effort it used to. This means your websites load faster (our testing showed as little as 1/3 of the time to load) while reducing the load on the server to decrease lags during peak traffic times. A big shout-out to the Neacsu Denner Team (Luxury West Vancouver Real Estate Specialists) for working with us to provide feedback on these speed improvements!
Mailchimp Integration
Mailchimp is our recommended email marketing system for newsletters & listing updates. The Brixwork core has been upgraded so that you can enter your Mailchimp account API key to allow automatic addition of emails from any contact form trigger. Thank you to Colin & Lynn at Nest Presales (Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster and Coquitlam Presale Specialists) for inspiring and providing feedback for this upgrade!
To utilize this feature, your contact forms must indicate that ongoing promotional/marketing emails will be sent to the recipient. Some of our newer websites have been built with this feature in mind. For older websites built before 2018-04, you may need to invest into some minor re-design or re-arrangement of the pages before enabling this feature.
Ensuring you remain within the CASL legislation’s boundaries is 100% your responsibility as the business owner, and Brixwork does not assume responsibility to any penalties/damages caused by enabling this feature before you consult the CASL regulations or your lawyer/managing broker/real estate council.
User Interface Upgrades
While some of these upgrades were already rolled out ahead of time, the listings & buildings screens have been updated on the back-end. . Our real estate websites aim to help you get the update done faster & easier, and we continue to research ways to help our Realtors® save time.
- Slimmer rows for each home/building- this made scanning through a long list easier, as well as quicker drag & drop to re-order items
- Fixed a glitch in the photo gallery upload module where the photos didn’t always upload in the order in which it displays on your computer when you drag & drop multiple photos.
A big thank you to Kylie Waters of the Rockel Group (Vancouver Westside and Eastside Luxury Marketing Specialists) for catching the photo bug and helping us test the successful fix!
MICRO UPDATE – Further Tweaks for 4.404
As our overall network traffic (measured by bandwidth) increased over 20% in March & April compared to the previous 4+ months. This traffic increase was attributed to:
- Increase in the real estate market in general
- Some of our top traffic sites had even bigger improvement in visitors
- Some of our SEO campaigned realtor websites have seen as much as 300%+
- Our team is building & deploying lots of new websites!
We noticed some other lags and some bursts of slow times when Google (and other) bots would crawl through our websites in mass. In the micro version update 4.404 released on April 18th, we introduced more measures to speed up thumbnail feeding on photo galleries, which was taking a significant amount of resources, and saw double-digit drops in server utility load.
What this means in simpler terms – we found more engineering finesse to help our sites load faster with less burden on the servers, so that traffic spikes & popularity spikes do not affect our network as much. Our testing shows that the impact of such spikes was barely noticeable after this upgrade.
Future Upgrade Roadmap
Better buildings & listings filtering
In the coming development sessions, we aim to make our listings & buildings pages on the back-end more user friendly by enabling filtering the items by name/street and/or status to make it faster & easier for you to find what you’re looking for. Many of our clients are high-volume, high-performing real estate agents – we are accommodating our back-end structure to ensure we keep up with the top-performers!
Listings Browse History Tracking
For any leads who enter their email addresses into your contact forms, you will be able to see which properties and which MLS® search filters the visitor used before entering their information. This will allow you to more effectively help these new clients out based on their desires & requirements.
