Creating a website with Carrot or NO Carrot
Member since 2021 · 1 post · 0 votes
Creating a website with Carrot or NO Carrot
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Contractor · Roseburg, OR · Member since 2019 · 5 posts · 2 votes
1yHey Rauph - Brady with Carrot!
1) We're happy to have you :) It sounds like reaching out to the team to explore options for getting help customizing your site either with our team or one of our parntersin the marketplace might be a good next step.
2) "if having a carrot website really helps me?" vs a Wordpress site...
Mohammad hit the nail on the head.
We get a lot of people moving from a custom Wordpress site to Carrot for two reasons:
1. The hidden costs, time management, and risks of Wordpress are real and often overlooked. I've built on worpress personally. You have separate plugins for form builders, SEO plugins, security plugins, analytics plugins, and so on. The cost adds up, you're on the hook for making sure plugins stay up to date since outdated plugins cause vulnerabilities which is when website hacks happen. You also want to get quality hosting and a quality content management system, plugins for compressing images, etc to keep the site loading fast, mobile-friendly & SEO-friendly.
2. Conversion. It's not just about ranking & SEO. When a seller goes to your website from any sort of marketing you're doing, you want them to convert into a lead. The website needs to be structured properly—the right pages in the right spots, robust & helpful written content, forms that are low-resistance and in the right locations with the right verbiage & fields, again it needs to be mobile-friendly and easy to navigate. Sure you can take the time & money to build out a full Wordpress site from scratch and spend time & money maintaining it, fixing things on your own when they break, but we created Carrot to save you the time & headache so you can focus on generating leads & closing deals. At the end of the day a website that misses the mark and isn't built with conversion in mind to capture leads will cost you more. What's 1 lost deal worth?
I get it, I'm biased because I work for Carrot. But I've built on Wordpress, Wix, and Carrot.
I know my reply is late, but hit us up through chat or hop on a call with our team - we'd love to help get you steered in the right direction!
9 Replies
- Residential Real Estate Agent · Atlanta, GA · Member since 2009 · 381 posts · 134 votes1y
SEO is a commitment did your not dedicated to that type of marketing use a basic website. Your paying $180 for nothing for now.
- Specialist · Huntingdon, PA · Member since 2014 · 160 posts · 59 votes1y
Hi Ralph,
A big part of SEO of a site is content, emphasizing quality, keyword optimization and user experience. So whether you have a Carrot site or a Wordpress site, these things will matter to rank high on Google. If you want to be generating leads from a website, SEO will help with credibility and long term visibility, and an attractive website will also help with building credibility and trust too. However, there are better options than $180 a month and $1000 for a WP site. If you want more info, send me a PM and I can send you a link to an article that explains further.
Take care! - Specialist · Member since 2020 · 4 posts · 2 votes1y
Speaking from hands on experience on both platforms as I've worked with both Carrot and Wordpress sites (more than 400 sites so far since 2017), what carrot brings into the table is their simple, all in one, fast website platform. It's basically built on top of WordPress core and they made it simple and easy to navigate.
Where in wordpress, you have to get some plugins (some are also monthly paid) to achieve the same kind of functionality.
As @Todd Heitner mentioned, SEO is not just about having a good hosting/platform and features, it's about utilizing the features in a way so your brand has visibility and people that come into your website gets proper value of their time spent.
Here's a table comparison for you that I wrote earlier:
Now whether you have a carrot or a wordpress site, for SEO, you will need:
- Website Credibility (Personalisation)
- On Page SEO (Keywords, Titles, Meta Tags, Description, Image ALT Tags & Optimization etc)
- Monthly Content Publishing (Regular Blogs & Location Pages)
- Monthly OFF Page SEO (Citations, Backlinks
Now if you consider the cost, end of the day it's quite same for both the platforms.
But if you are starting fresh, I see no point of having their 180$ plan, you can continue with 89$/month plan from carrot and assign someone in your team to put regular blog posts and update the location pages. It can take 3-6 months to start seeing visible growth in organic traffic if all the things mentioned above are taken care of. Then when you see some tractions or close some deals, you can reinvest in your website. - Contractor · Roseburg, OR · Member since 2019 · 5 posts · 2 votes1y
Hey Rauph - Brady with Carrot!
1) We're happy to have you :) It sounds like reaching out to the team to explore options for getting help customizing your site either with our team or one of our parntersin the marketplace might be a good next step.
2) "if having a carrot website really helps me?" vs a Wordpress site...
Mohammad hit the nail on the head.
We get a lot of people moving from a custom Wordpress site to Carrot for two reasons:
1. The hidden costs, time management, and risks of Wordpress are real and often overlooked. I've built on worpress personally. You have separate plugins for form builders, SEO plugins, security plugins, analytics plugins, and so on. The cost adds up, you're on the hook for making sure plugins stay up to date since outdated plugins cause vulnerabilities which is when website hacks happen. You also want to get quality hosting and a quality content management system, plugins for compressing images, etc to keep the site loading fast, mobile-friendly & SEO-friendly.
2. Conversion. It's not just about ranking & SEO. When a seller goes to your website from any sort of marketing you're doing, you want them to convert into a lead. The website needs to be structured properly—the right pages in the right spots, robust & helpful written content, forms that are low-resistance and in the right locations with the right verbiage & fields, again it needs to be mobile-friendly and easy to navigate. Sure you can take the time & money to build out a full Wordpress site from scratch and spend time & money maintaining it, fixing things on your own when they break, but we created Carrot to save you the time & headache so you can focus on generating leads & closing deals. At the end of the day a website that misses the mark and isn't built with conversion in mind to capture leads will cost you more. What's 1 lost deal worth?
I get it, I'm biased because I work for Carrot. But I've built on Wordpress, Wix, and Carrot.
I know my reply is late, but hit us up through chat or hop on a call with our team - we'd love to help get you steered in the right direction! - Investor · Get yourself trained before doing something inadvisable. · Member since 2024 · 3k+ posts · 1k+ votes1y.
Quote from @Rauph Souleimanov:
Hello Everyone!
I currently have a website that I created with Carrot.
It did ok the first couple of months but since then there have been no leads at all.
I realize that my SEO optimization and stuff isn't great, so I really need to see what should be my next steps.
I can optimize my Carrot website and pay someone to do it for like 500-700 of Upwork. But then I am still stuck with the monthly payment of $180 a month.
Or I could suck it up and create a brand new website on WordPress for $1000 and then not have to pay more than $10 a month for the web hosting.
The problem is that I am curious if having a carrot website really helps me?
If there is no difference between Carrot and WordPress when it comes to SEO and ranking on GOOGLE then it might make sense to go with WordPress for a long-term play.
Has anyone thought about this before, and came to a decision?
Thank you!
I have a wordpress website that I set up and maintain. It does not bring me leads.
My website is to show how I train people to use creative financing to buy properties. It is also used to show people that I am well qualified to buy their property. It has worked very well for those purposes, when I DIRECT people to the website.
The website on Wordpress in and of itself, is useless by itself. (My opinion)
Being attached to a large website like Carrot, is more likely to get you leads, but if you are not getting leads there, websites just won't do it for you. Find another source of leads. - Investor · VA · Member since 2015 · 21k+ posts · 19k+ votes1y
Quote from @Rauph Souleimanov:
Hello Everyone!
I currently have a website that I created with Carrot.
It did ok the first couple of months but since then there have been no leads at all.
I realize that my SEO optimization and stuff isn't great, so I really need to see what should be my next steps.
I can optimize my Carrot website and pay someone to do it for like 500-700 of Upwork. But then I am still stuck with the monthly payment of $180 a month.
Or I could suck it up and create a brand new website on WordPress for $1000 and then not have to pay more than $10 a month for the web hosting.
The problem is that I am curious if having a carrot website really helps me?
If there is no difference between Carrot and WordPress when it comes to SEO and ranking on GOOGLE then it might make sense to go with WordPress for a long-term play.
Has anyone thought about this before, and came to a decision?
Thank you!You can have a wordpress site created for like $100 nowadays and realize the website is not what brings the leads its your advertising. SEO has changed so much and there are so many websites out there SEO for real estate only works if spending huge money.
If I were you I would find someone on upwork to create a wordpress site for you and go from there.
7e investments53 Reviews - 1yTrevor MauchPro MemberInvestor · Roseburg, OR · Member since 2014 · 141 posts · 149 votes
@Rauph Souleimanov Hope you're well man! Catching up on this thread.
Great convo here!
I'll weigh in from the perspective of a guy who's helped more people pull in motivated seller leads online than any other person in the industry over the last 12 years on what to look for when you dial in your site.
First, I'm reminded of something a fly fishing buddy of mine said years ago when we were fishing together. He didn't make that much money but he always had the best equipment. The best. He could have gotten the cheaper $125 fly rod that looked similar to the untrained eye... but he bought the $700 fly rod (the top of the line on durability and performance), etc.
He said... "I don't make enough money to go cheap".I had to think about it for a second but he paid more upfront for the best but will save a ton of money over the long run vs. replacing broken rods more often, losing fish because of an issue in the equipment, having to spend more time maintaining the equipment, etc. In the end, investing into the best is saving him a ton of money vs. trying to go cheaper quality up front.
On the website side of things, quality comes out in a few ways:
- Site speed: We're moving a client back over to Carrot from a custom wordpress site they paid $3k for last July. They hired a new marketing leader at their company.. the leader thought they could save a few bucks long term and "control" their design better... what happened is they lost 3 of their 5 top 3 Google rankings... their page speed went from loading in under 2 seconds to 5 seconds (a Google performance score of 98 to one of 78 on desktop)... and the web designer got the site to look close... but missed some key elements on the mobile design that were for sure lowering their conversion rate. The company they hired was a reputable marketing agency in Baltimore who has been building Wordpress sites for 10 years... they just aren't experts at building websites that truly perform at the highest levels.
That website switch last July likely has cost them minimum of $50k in lost deals just from the lower conversion rate... likely up into the 6 figures when you consider the lost Google rankings after the switch too. So they're bringing it back to Carrot for performance but are also getting the ease (they never have to worry about updating wordpress plugins, or wordpress versions, or upgrading servers, etc).
Chris above is 100% correct that you can go to Upwork and get something quick and cheap... but I do disagree w/ him that it's not the website that brings leads... that it's the advertising.
It's actually both. Great advertising with a mediocre website will leak leads and deals costing tens of thousands per lost deal. We see it often where someone who does a lot of direct mail or TV advertising had a website up... it got leads from people going online... but then they switched to a high performing Carrot site and with no extra traffic... their website converted more leads and deals because it was built for performance. The website can make offline marketing perform better if it's done right... or it could cost leads and deals if it looks close but isn't quite dialed in.
- Reliability + Security: Last month I was talking with with a client who moved over from a competing solution that had a security issue pop up that compromised the clients website. This happens all of the time on people with their own custom Wordpress sites. The challenge w/ Wordpress is it's a much bigger job than the initial build out + $10/mo hosting. Hackers are always trying to exploit Wordpress since it's the largest website platform in the world... so they tend to look for exploits in plugins, outdated plugins, outdated Wordpress files, etc. Really consisently we get people coming over after having to go to someone on Upwork to try to get access to their custom wordpress site after a hack again. This is something we take care of for our clients so you as a client can just focus on being an investor... not a techy or security guy.
- Hosting: One mistake I made years back was thinking that all hosting is the same. So I'd buy the lowest cost hosting I could find on hostgator or godaddy ($6/mo - $10/mo). I never fully understood why people would pay $30/mo or $100/mo just for the hosting on a virtual private server or similar. Until I started to realize that the large "shared hosting" plans in that $10/mo range were shared w/ thousands of other sites... in any different topic / niche... and several times my site load speed was dragging down big time... so I reached out to their support and on a shared hosting platform that isn't tightly controlled (like Carrot) on the quality of the sites on the network and the type of sites... one bad site can drag down the whole group of sites on that network. The support at hostgator told me there was a single site that was taking up immense resources in the cluster my site was a part of and they apologized. It even went offline several times over the years. So I moved up to a VPS (virtual private server) to have more security, performance, and control... and I wouldn't host any website that was an important site for me on a shared account again. VPS alone on hostgator is between $35/mo - $89/mo just for the hosting (not including anything else). Carrot takes care of all of that for you, we upgrade our servers many times per year to keep them crazy fast, secure, and we have redundant backups on backups on backups (which most other hosts don't backup with as much redundancy as we do).
- Conversion and SEO: We've focused exclusively on helping investors and agents dominate online in this space for over a decade. We created the standard on what performs in this industry and we're still innovating on it today. We've seen many people hire someone to "copy" a carrot site... and many of them look really good. The challenge is, you're copying the site in that snapshot in time... but also not knowing why certain elements are the way they are on the site. For instance, we changed 5 words on a site in a big test years ago and it almost doubled the conversion rate on the website. We tested it across many other sites... it did close to the same... so we rolled that out to our clients. So if someone gets someone to create a site on upwork today... unless they're continually upgrading the server, upgrading the code when new mobile phone technology comes out, upgrading the site from a speed/conversion/and seo perspective... you have to continue paying that person (and hoping they have the expertise to know what performs the best right now.
End of the day we're in the business of saving our members time and saving them lost deals.
If we can save you a a few hours a month vs. messing w/ tech stuff... and your time is worth lets say $100/hr... that's $300/mo or $3k+/yr just in your time savings.
But where we get most of the bigger guys switching to Carrot (who can afford custom WP sites), is performance. They realized that even if they lose just 1 $30k profit deal a year from under performance... that's too much.
You can tell I'm passionate about this my man because I've worked with soooooo many people over the years with the same question.
And it's a GREAT question by the way. I think people would be crazy not to ask that question.
I've just seen too many people think they can save upfront but end up losing tons of time and money by trying to go cheap.
We're here for you man! Let's get you dialed in. 1 extra deal pays for Carrot for 10+ years. DM me or ping me on IG and we've got you!
- Member since 2026 · 15 posts · 3 votes3mo
Honestly, ditching Carrot was the best move I made. Those monthly template fees add up fast, and a cheap $500 Upwork fix rarely touches deep technical SEO or AI search stuff like GEO. When I was stuck in a similar spot, I transferred everything to a custom WordPress setup with NUVEW Web Solutions. Ended up owning the site outright, cut out the crazy monthly overhead, and the leads actually started coming in once the ranking was handled right.
- 3dMuhammad LuqmanPro MemberSpecialist · Member since 2026 · 20 posts · 1 vote
Rauph, I've been working in Local SEO since 2021, mainly with cash home buyers and real estate investors, and I have hands-on experience with both Carrot and WordPress websites.
Here's my perspective: Carrot vs. WordPress isn't really the problem. Your SEO strategy is.
Carrot is a good platform for real estate investors. It gives you a decent starting structure, but simply launching a Carrot website doesn't mean Google will rank it or send you motivated sellers.
I've seen Carrot websites with almost no organic visibility, while others rank for hundreds of local keywords. The difference usually comes down to how the SEO work is done.
If I were in your position, I'd focus on these things first:
Google Search Console: Check whether your organic traffic actually dropped or whether visitors are still coming but not submitting forms.
Keyword rankings: See where your website ranks for "sell my house fast," "we buy houses," and other commercial keywords in your buying market.
City and situation pages: Build properly optimized pages targeting your buying areas and homeowners dealing with foreclosure, inherited properties, divorce, unwanted rentals, etc.
Technical and on-page SEO: Improve headings, keyword targeting, internal linking, content quality, and Google indexing.
Google Business Profile: Your website and GBP should support each other to improve visibility in Google Search and Maps.
About the $500–$700 SEO investment: That could cover a useful initial audit and some improvements, but competitive local SEO generally requires consistent monthly work.
And regarding WordPress, yes, it gives you excellent control over SEO and can reduce platform costs. But you'll still have maintenance, security, hosting, and other expenses.
My recommendation would be to audit your existing Carrot website before spending $1,000 rebuilding everything. If the current website is technically sound, improving its SEO might make more sense than starting over.
One question, Rauph: When you say your Carrot website generated leads for the first couple of months, were those leads coming from Google organic search, Google Maps, paid advertising, or another source?
That would be the first thing I'd investigate before deciding whether to stay with Carrot or move to WordPress.
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