How fast is your apartment website?
Two minutes, two tools, and a number you can put in an email. Below that, the measured numbers from a community site we built, with the method, so you can check our claim as easily as your own.
Measure yours in about two minutes
1. Run PageSpeed Insights. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste your community's address, and read the mobile score. It is free, it is Google's own tool, and it is the number most people will quote back at you. Anything under 50 on mobile is worth acting on.
2. Check the weight. The score moves around between runs. Page weight does not. If you are comfortable in a terminal, this prints the transfer size of your page in bytes:
If you are not, PageSpeed reports the same thing under "Total Byte Weight."
What the numbers mean
Three things decide whether a renter waits for your page on a phone, on cell data, standing outside your building.
- Time to first byte. How long the server takes to start answering. Under 200 milliseconds is good. Over 600 means the page is being assembled on demand, usually by a database and a template engine, every single time somebody asks for it.
- Page weight. Everything the browser must download before the page is usable. A text-and-photos apartment page has no honest reason to be heavy.
- Render-blocking files. Stylesheets and scripts the browser must fetch and process before it can draw anything. Each one is a separate round trip. This is usually where apartment sites lose.
What makes apartment websites slow
It is rarely the photos, which is what everyone assumes. It is almost always the accumulated widgets:
- A chat or AI leasing assistant, often 200KB or more on its own
- A tour scheduling embed
- A virtual tour or 3D player that loads whether or not anyone opens it
- A pricing and availability script that phones home on every page load
- Two or three analytics and ad retargeting tags
- An accessibility overlay, which is its own problem and does not make a site accessible
Each was added by somebody solving a real problem. Nobody removes the previous one, and none of them were weighed against the leases lost while the page was still blank.
Our numbers, and how to check them
Rather than describe our work, here are two community sites you can open and measure yourself. They are demonstration communities, fictional but fully built, exactly the way we build a client site.
| Page | HTML transfer | Time to first byte | Render-blocking files |
|---|---|---|---|
| Westline Flats, home | 5,339 bytes | 55 ms | 0 |
| Westline Flats, floor plans | 4,250 bytes | 42 ms | 0 |
| Campus Quarter, home | 5,382 bytes | 43 ms | 0 |
Zero render-blocking files is the part worth explaining. Those pages carry their styling inside the document itself, so the browser can draw the page from the single response it already has. There is no stylesheet to go and fetch, no framework, and no third-party script. The hero image loads immediately and every other image waits until you scroll near it.
Open the demo and run PageSpeed against it yourself. That is the point of publishing the address.
One number we are not proud of
Measure the page you are reading and you will get a worse result than the demos: about 9,800 bytes of HTML and four render-blocking files. Roughly 170KB of that is Google Analytics.
We keep it because we need to know where our own leads come from, and it is worth saying plainly rather than letting you find it. A community site does not need our analytics stack, which is exactly why the sites we build for communities do not carry it. If we published a speed page and quietly hoped nobody measured our own, that would tell you something about the rest of our claims.
What to do with your number
If your mobile score is under 50 or your page is over about 3MB, you have a real problem and a specific one, and the fix usually starts with removing things rather than rebuilding. Take a screenshot of the PageSpeed result. It is the rare marketing argument that arrives as evidence instead of an opinion, and it survives being forwarded to whoever approves the budget.
Last verified 2026-09-04. We re-measure when we change the demos.
Want to see your community's number next to that?
Send us the address and we will measure it and tell you what is actually slowing it down, whether or not you hire us.