Which hosting plan for a real estate agency: listings, many photos and search

The short answer: what weighs on an agency site is the photographs and the property search, which queries the database on every filter. To start, an entry shared plan is fine, with the images well handled; if search gets slow with more listings, that is the sign to move up.

What weighs, and what does not

Part of the site	What to do
Property photos	They are the weight of the site. Shrink them before uploading and use WebP. See Image optimisation and WebP and Lazy loading.
Search and filters	Each filter is a question to the database. If it gets slow with many listings, it is the same problem as a big shop: A shop with thousands of products is slow.
Map	An embedded map loads third-party scripts. Load it only when the person reaches the map area or presses a button.
Sold or let properties	Do not let the page return a 404: show “sold” or lead to similar properties. See Crawl errors in Search Console.
Contact	A WhatsApp button on each listing: Putting WhatsApp on your site.

How to choose, step by step

1	Start with the entry plan and measure: How to monitor your site performance in cPanel.

2	Set a photo size (a maximum width, for example) and ask whoever uploads them to follow it.

3	Switch on page caching for the listing pages, which change little.

4	Watch the signs: slow search, process-limit errors (Entry processes). They are the warning to move to a bigger plan.

A portal that imports listings from several places or from a management program does heavy work in the background. When the import is slow or fails, it is not the entry plan that is too small: look first at how and how often it imports.

Each listing should have its own text. Copying the description from another site makes Google treat the pages as repeats: The canonical tag.

Building a real estate agency’s site? Tell us how many listings you expect and how you will update them.

Open a support ticket

In our plans

Situation	Plan	Why
Starting out: one agency, a modest number of listings	Pro	1 site, 10 GB SSD NVMe, unlimited e-mail accounts on the agency’s own domain and unlimited databases for the listings.
Many photos per property, or a second site (a brand, a region)	Plus	6 sites and 20 GB SSD NVMe, which is where the photo archive grows.
A large portfolio, or several agencies on the same hosting	Ultra or Business	Unlimited sites and 30 to 200 GB SSD NVMe, depending on the plan.

When to move up: move up when the disk space starts to run out (property photos fill it faster than anything else), when you add another site, or when the alerts and replies you send reach the plan’s limit of e-mails per hour (100 in Pro, 200 in Plus, 300 in Ultra). If search stays slow even with the images handled and caching on, or if the import from a management program is heavy, the next step is a VPS (VPS1 has 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM and 40 GB NVMe) or a Cloud plan, with resources of its own. Moving up can be done at any time and does not lose the site, and every plan has an automatic daily backup with free restores.

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