Image optimisation for estate agency websites

We've rolled out one of the biggest behind-the-scenes performance upgrades we've made to the Estate Apps platform. And every single client gets it.

Property photography is rather important when you're trying to sell a house.

Unfortunately, it's also one of the heaviest things an estate agency website has to deal with.

A single property can contain dozens of high-resolution photographs. Add search results, galleries, featured properties, area guides, blogs and everything else and there's suddenly a lot of imagery for a visitor's device to download.

For years, that's presented us with a particular frustration.

We could make our websites fast. But we couldn't always control the images being fed into them.

Now, that's changed.

We've tackled the bit we couldn't control

A huge proportion of the imagery on an estate agency website doesn't actually originate from the website.

It comes from the agent's CRM.

Street, Reapit, Apex27, Dezrez, Vebra Alto, Lifesycle and other systems automatically supply property information and photography through their feeds.

And those photographs aren't necessarily optimised for web delivery.

We could optimise our platform, code and infrastructure until the cows came home, only for a CRM to hand us 25 enormous property photographs and effectively say:

"Here you go. Deal with those."

So we have.

We've built an image optimisation and delivery system capable of dealing with that imagery automatically.

It's now live across the Estate Apps platform.

Not just property photos. Every part of the platform.

Solving CRM-fed property photography was the difficult bit, but we didn't want to stop there.

The new system also covers imagery uploaded directly through the Estate Apps Hub/CMS.

So whether it's:

Property photography arriving from your CRM
A new blog article
An area guide
A team profile
A development
Other imagery uploaded through the Hub

...the platform can now take care of the optimisation behind the scenes.

The important bit for our clients?

You don't need to change a thing.

Same photography. Less unnecessary weight.

We aren't asking agents to start uploading tiny photographs.

And we're certainly not interested in making beautiful property photography look like it was taken on a Nokia in 2004.

The objective is much simpler.

Maintain the visual quality. Remove the unnecessary weight. Deliver the image more efficiently.

Behind the scenes, property imagery can now be resized to a sensible web size, converted into a more efficient format for the web and prepared for delivery through our new image network.

But reducing the file size is only half of what we've changed.

We've changed how the image gets to your visitor too

Previously, property photography was served directly from the storage server used by our property-feed infrastructure.

That meant the original file had to travel from the same central source whenever it was required.

Our new approach is rather different.

Optimised copies are prepared in advance and distributed through Cloudflare's delivery network.

That means a visitor can be served an optimised copy from an edge location much closer to them rather than every request travelling back to the original storage server. Once cached, subsequent visitors can be served from that edge too.

In less technical language:

The image is lighter. And we're giving it a shorter journey.

For somebody browsing properties on their phone, that's the bit that matters.

They don't care where the image is stored.

They just want to see the house.

So... does it actually make a difference?

We didn't want to launch this based purely on what should happen.

We wanted to measure it.

So before the platform-wide rollout, our development team ran detailed testing using live property imagery on Cooper Adams.

The test covered 504 property photographs across 24 live listings, alongside floorplans, EPCs and other files. The same images were compared through both the old storage route and the new image delivery system.

Property photographs were 30.7% smaller on average

Across the 504 property photographs tested, total image weight fell from 190.4MB to 132.0MB.

That's an average reduction of 30.7%, with no visible loss in the photography.

And that's only the first part of the story.

Smaller files. Much faster delivery in our testing.

Our team also tested how quickly complete property galleries could be delivered.

The test compared a Cooper Adams property using the new delivery network against a property of similar gallery size on a sister website using the previous storage route.

Across five runs, the new gallery completed in a median 1.8 seconds.

The comparison gallery took 8.0 seconds.

Normalised per image, the new delivery method was 4.1x faster in that test.

That's why we're calling this an image optimisation and delivery upgrade, rather than simply image compression.

We're not just making the files lighter.

We're improving how they're delivered too.

What does that mean when someone's actually browsing?

This is where all the technical work becomes rather more relevant.

On the 24 properties we tested, the images on an average listing weighed around 8.3MB before optimisation.

Through the new delivery network, that fell to around 5.6MB.

That's approximately 2.7MB less image data for a visitor to download every time they view one of those listings.

Now picture somebody browsing properties on their phone.

They've found the agent through Google, clicked a property shared on social media or arrived through a Property AdVantage campaign.

They search.

Open a property.

Swipe through the gallery.

Go back.

Open another.

They're not thinking about WebP, caching, CDNs or image optimisation.

They're thinking:

"Show me the house."

Our job is to remove as much unnecessary friction between those two things as possible.

The main property image appeared considerably sooner too

We also ran Google's Lighthouse testing against the two property pages, and the main property image appeared substantially sooner on the new delivery network.

The two websites don't load their galleries in exactly the same way, so we're treating that result as a promising signal rather than a clean, like-for-like benchmark - not something we'd stake a headline on yet.

It's already pointed us toward the next round of improvements.

One improvement tends to uncover the next

During testing, our developers spotted that some property-page thumbnails are currently requesting much larger image files than they actually need.

We also found opportunities to delay loading gallery photographs until they're required rather than downloading everything immediately.

So we've already moved onto the next round of improvements.

And this, really, is why we're so pleased with the project.

We haven't reached the end and said:

"Lovely. Image optimisation done."

We've measured it, found the next bottleneck and carried on.

That's how we believe a managed platform should work.

What changed on your website?

If you're already an Estate Apps client, the answer is wonderfully simple.

The technology underneath it got better.

Your CRM sends us a new property with 30 photographs?

We handle the optimisation.

Your team uploads an image to an area guide?

We handle it.

New blog image?

Handled.

New team photograph?

Handled.

And your team carries on working exactly as it did yesterday.

There are no new image guidelines to learn.

No files to compress manually.

No changes to your CRM workflow.

No new software.

No switch to turn on.

We've done the complicated bit so you don't have to.

Every Estate Apps client gets it

This matters to us.

We haven't turned image optimisation into another product.

There's no "Image Optimisation Package."

There's no implementation charge.

And we're not reserving the technology for clients paying for a higher subscription.

It's now part of the Estate Apps platform for every client, regardless of their subscription tier.

Because we see this as part of our job.

This is what we mean by ongoing maintenance

"Ongoing maintenance" isn't exactly the sexiest phrase we've ever put on a proposal.

But perhaps that's because most of the interesting stuff happens where nobody sees it.

This particular upgrade has required a considerable amount of development, testing and R&D.

Not because something was broken.

Not because a client paid us to build it.

And not because we needed another feature to sell.

We knew there was an important part of website performance we could improve, so we invested in improving it.

That's what our clients' subscriptions support.

Not simply keeping the website they originally bought online.

But continually maintaining and developing the technology underneath it.

Sometimes that means responding to changes from Google, browsers or CRMs.

Sometimes it's improving security or infrastructure.

Sometimes it's building completely new functionality.

And sometimes it's solving a problem most clients probably didn't even realise they had.

Your website shouldn't stand still

The web doesn't.

Google doesn't.

Browsers don't.

CRMs don't.

And the expectations of somebody browsing for their next home certainly don't.

So we don't think an estate agency website should be frozen at whatever was technically possible on the day it launched.

It should keep getting better.

This upgrade is another example of that.

The website might look the same.

But the technology delivering the imagery underneath it has changed.

It's lighter.

It's smarter.

And based on our testing so far, it can be considerably faster.

No upgrade. No additional cost. No work required.

Just a better platform underneath your business.

Already an Estate Apps client?

There's nothing you need to do.

The new image optimisation and delivery system is now live across the Estate Apps platform and included as part of our ongoing maintenance and development.

Keep listing properties. Keep uploading content.

We'll keep looking after what happens underneath.