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I had previously written a post about whether an agent had true administrative control of their WordPress website. But something new has come up recently. There is a difference between owning your site and owning a site that is 100% portable.

We tell our clients they will own their WordPress real estate website outright. 100% with full admin control of the dashboard. We highlight the fact our websites are 100% portable. This means if you choose to leave our hosting, we can transfer your site to the hosting company of your choice and you would be billed for the IDX directly. Nothing will break. All features including our custom plugins will continue to work. In addition, if you take possession of your website, you can edit, add, delete or do design work with the WordPress and builder environment. Lastly if at some point you want to hire a new WordPress developer, 100% of the content from you pages and blog can be zipped up and moved to the new site with ease.

A couple of weeks ago we brought on two new clients that were each leaving two website development companies that some might consider our competition. These clients do own their websites however, if they were to move the site off that company’s platform they would loose some functionality and the proprietary plugins would no longer be supported. In fact one company that claims their clients own their WordPress website stated,

“…you can keep your site with you reasonably easily, compared to other website builders. If you decide to part ways, most of what you’ve built will go with you! Contrast that with big names like Real Geeks, BoomTown, and kvCORE where you are effectively renting a website. If you leave those companies, you are generally leaving your website behind, too.”

We brought on a new client that had built out thousands of search landing pages and they had a blog with over 300 posts. All of these pages and posts had been indexed by the search engines. The majority of the time, when you own a WordPress real estate website and want to have us design a new site for you, we can import your existing website pages and keep 100% of your blog intact. This was not the case with the company he was leaving. Rather then using the default page and blog post posting tools that come standard with WordPress, this company had him use their proprietary content creation plugins. Because all of this content and data was created within their platform, we did not have the ability to bulk import anything. I look at this as holding a client captive. At the end of the day, this new client chose to go with us but he will have to pay his VA in the Philippines to manually move all of this content into the new site we are building for him.

I am not going to mention the company names but there is most definitely a a “slight-of-hand” going on the real estate website industry. Please schedule a demo with me to learn more about our 100% portable real estate websites.

– CJ

 

 

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