Why Land Brokerage Sites Fail Core Web Vitals (and What to Fix First)

Fewer than half of mobile websites pass Google’s Core Web Vitals. The 2025 Web Almanac put the figure at 48 percent, and few sites lean on images harder than a land brokerage site.

Images are the core of the problem. On most mobile pages, the largest element on screen is an image, and a land listing is mostly images. The photo gallery, drone flyover, and aerial map are what sell a tract. The fix is loading them in the right order while keeping every one of them.

This guide covers what the three scores measure on a listing page and the five reasons land sites usually fail them. It also shows how to read your own results when Google shows “No data,” and it gives you an order for fixing things. It picks up where the speed check in our guide to what an SEO audit should cover leaves off.

What Core Web Vitals measure, in land terms

Core Web Vitals are three measurements of how a page feels to a real visitor. Google’s Core Web Vitals documentation describes them as measures of loading, interactivity, and visual stability, and it sets a “good” target for each one. Here’s what each looks like on a land listing.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading. On a listing page, it’s usually the moment the main property photo finishes appearing. Google’s target is within 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures responsiveness. It’s how long the page takes to react when a buyer taps the map, a filter, or the arrow to the next photo. The target is under 200 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability. It scores how much the page moves as photos, banners, and embeds load in. The target is a score under 0.1.

Google grades by the weakest of the three. In Search Console, a group of pages takes the status of its worst-performing metric, so one weak score fails the whole assessment.

Google says it highly recommends good Core Web Vitals for success in Search, and that they align with what its core ranking systems reward. As our audit guide notes, a passing score doesn’t guarantee a top ranking. Treat these numbers as part of how your site serves buyers, alongside your listings and local content.

Why land sites have a harder test than most

The Web Almanac is HTTP Archive’s yearly study, and the 2025 edition draws on real Chrome data from July 2025. Desktop sites do better than phones, with 56 percent passing all three scores. On mobile, the breakdown by metric shows where the trouble sits.

LCP is the lowest of the three on mobile at 62 percent good. INP comes in at 77 percent and CLS at 81 percent.

Land pages carry more of what drives that loading score than most sites. A REALSTACK listing has fields for aerial and locator maps alongside the photo gallery. Our county and state Collection pages include draw-on-map search across live inventory. Buyers use those features to judge a property from a distance, so the job is loading them well.

Listing and search pages also have a different weak spot than your homepage. The Almanac found mobile pages past the homepage scored worse on responsiveness, at 69 percent good INP compared with 80 percent for homepages. Its authors point to the filters, carousels, and third-party widgets those deeper pages tend to carry. A passing homepage tells you little about how your listings respond to a buyer’s taps.

Five reasons land brokerage sites fail Core Web Vitals

These are the causes we run into most on land sites. Each one maps to a specific score, and each has a fix that keeps the content buyers want.

1. Full-size listing and drone photos

Photos uploaded straight from a camera or drone are usually far larger than a phone screen needs. When the main listing photo is that heavy, LCP suffers on every visit. The Almanac found JPG is still the format for 57 percent of the images that load as a page’s main element, though newer formats like WebP compress better.

Resize and compress photos before they go on the site, and use WebP where your platform supports it. Our post on the design mistakes land brokers make covers keeping photos crisp while you shrink them. For scale, Google’s Search Console help lists a page under 500 KB, including everything it loads, as best practice. A full listing gallery won’t fit that budget on first load, which is why the next fix matters.

2. Lazy loading on the main listing photo

Lazy loading tells the browser to hold off on images until a visitor scrolls near them. That’s the right setting for the photos further down a gallery. It’s the wrong setting for the first photo, since that image is usually what LCP measures. The Almanac found about 16 percent of pages still lazy-load their main image.

Google’s guidance on lazy loading is direct. Load images that appear in the first screen right away, especially the main image, and lazy-load only what sits below it. On a listing page, the hero photo loads first and the rest of the gallery waits for the scroll.

3. Galleries and banners with no reserved space

When an image has no set width and height, the browser lays out the page as if the image had zero height. Once the photo arrives, everything below it gets pushed down. A buyer reaching for the “Contact agent” button can end up tapping a photo instead. The Almanac found 62 percent of mobile pages leave at least one image without set dimensions.

Give every image a width and height. Google’s lazy-loading guidance recommends setting dimensions for all images so the browser can reserve space before the photo loads. Do the same for banners and promo bars. The Almanac notes that homepages, with their hero media, banners, and promotional elements, shift more than other pages.

4. Map and video embeds that load on page open

A YouTube flyover or an embedded map pulls code from another company’s servers. By default, that code loads with the page whether the buyer presses play or not. web.dev’s guide to third-party embeds says many popular embeds include over 100 KB of JavaScript, and some reach 2 MB. It estimates that lazy loading a single YouTube embed saves about 500 KB on the first load. Embeds can also shift the layout as they load in.

Load video and maps that sit below the first screen only when a buyer scrolls to them, or use a facade. A facade is a lightweight image of the player or map that swaps in the real thing when someone clicks it. The same web.dev guide shows a map facade built from a static image.

5. Widgets stacked on every page

Chat boxes, popups, social feeds, review widgets, and tracking scripts each add code a phone has to run. That code competes with the buyer’s taps, which is how a map search page can look loaded and still feel slow to respond. The Almanac tied part of the weaker INP on deeper mobile pages to JavaScript from third-party widgets.

Responsiveness work pays off. QuintoAndar, a Brazilian housing platform, cut its INP by 80 percent and saw a 36 percent year-over-year rise in conversions, according to Google’s QuintoAndar case study on web.dev.

List every script and widget running on your listing and map search pages. Remove anything that isn’t doing a job on that page, and load chat and popups only where they serve one.

How to check your own site, and what “No data” means

Start with PageSpeed Insights. It shows two kinds of results, and the PageSpeed Insights documentation explains the difference. Lab data comes from a controlled test run and is useful for debugging. Field data comes from real visitors on a variety of devices and connections.

Field data is where “No data” comes from. Google collects it through the Chrome User Experience Report, which Google Search uses to inform its page experience ranking factor. Chrome’s rules for which sites get field data require a page or site to be publicly discoverable and sufficiently popular, meaning it has a minimum number of visitors.

Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report runs on that same field data. If it shows “No data available,” either your property is new in Search Console, or there isn’t enough data for that device type. When a group of pages lacks data, Search Console rolls up to your whole site. If the whole site lacks data, the report stays empty. Each score reflects what 75 percent of visits experienced over the last 28 days.

A specialized land brokerage site may well see that empty report, since its audience is far smaller than a national portal’s. When it does, the lab test is your working tool. Run three page types, because they fail for different reasons: one listing page, one county or state Collection page, and your map search page. Test each on mobile, note the weakest metric, and retest the same three pages after each change.

What to fix first

If you can only take on part of this list this month, work in this order. It starts with the loading score most sites struggle with, on the pages that carry your inventory.

1. Load the first listing photo right away and lazy-load the rest of the gallery.
2. Resize and compress listing photos before upload, and use WebP where you can.
3. Set below-the-fold video and map embeds to load on scroll or on click.
4. Give every image, banner, and embed reserved space.
5. Audit the widgets and scripts on listing and map search pages.
6. Retest the same three pages on mobile.

What your website platform should handle, and what stays with you

Some of this work belongs to your website provider. Server speed, caching, and a content delivery network are platform jobs, and you shouldn’t have to manage them. REALSTACK sites run on fully managed hosting with a CDN, redundant databases, security, backups, and software updates, which supports speed and Core Web Vitals.

That split matches where the wider web is heading. The Almanac’s authors suggest the future of web performance may depend more on smart defaults built into the tools that build sites.

What stays with you is what you add. That includes the photos you upload, the videos and maps you embed, and the chat tools, popups, and tracking scripts you or an outside vendor install. Each choice shows up in your scores.

Run that check on a listing, a Collection page, and your map search page, and you’ll know which of the five causes to start with.

Start with one listing page

Core Web Vitals reward what buyers want from a listing. The main photo shows up fast, the map responds when tapped, and the page holds still while it loads. Land pages are heavier than most, so the gains come from loading photos, maps, and video in the right order.

REALSTACK has built hundreds of land broker websites. If you want help finding what’s slowing your listing pages, our SEO team can go through your listing and Collection pages with you.

Sources

• HTTP Archive, The 2025 Web Almanac: Performance
• Google Search Central, Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results
• Google Search Central, Understanding page experience in Google Search results
• Search Console Help, Core Web Vitals report
• Chrome for Developers, Overview of CrUX
• Chrome for Developers, CrUX methodology
• PageSpeed Insights, About PageSpeed Insights
• web.dev, Browser-level image lazy loading for the web
• web.dev, Best practices for using third-party embeds
• web.dev, How QuintoAndar reduced INP by 80%, increasing conversions by 36%