Website benchmark: how fast are agencies?

Why this benchmark exists

Web agencies often promise speed, but a sales pitch does not tell you how their own websites perform. We could not find a comparable, ongoing benchmark of the agencies ranking for “website laten maken” in Belgium and the Netherlands. This is our attempt to provide one: the same tests on each homepage, repeated monthly, with the method and results published.

Every website in the table was tested on the same day with the same mobile Lighthouse settings. We ran three tests per website and took the median for each metric. That gives us a consistent method, not a verdict on the agency’s work. Scores can change, which is why we measure again the next month.

How we measure

Which agencies participate

Every month we retrieve the top 10 organic results for “website laten maken” in Google Belgium and Google Netherlands. We test the homepage of each business that builds websites, excluding businesses that do not, such as comparison platforms or forums. If the same business ranks in both countries, we measure it once. The number after the country code records that business’s organic position on the SERP: NL #1 means position 1 in Google Netherlands on the measurement date. The ranking URL may be a service page or blog post; the lab test always uses the homepage.

The lab scores

We run three Lighthouse tests per website through the PageSpeed Insights API with mobile settings, then report the median for each metric. We track five categories: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO, each scored from 0 to 100, plus Agentic Browsing, which reports a pass ratio such as 3/3. Our overall score is the average of the four 0–100 scores. Agentic Browsing stays separate because a pass ratio is not equivalent to a weighted score. In the November 2026 edition, one of the three runs failed for one homepage (Sabine Boogaard); its lab values are the median of the two successful runs.

The CrUX LCP column

Next to the lab scores is a “CrUX LCP (p75)” column. It comes from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX), not from our Lighthouse runs. CrUX holds field data: performance measured for eligible Chrome users within a 28-day window.

p75 is the LCP value at or below which 75% of measured page loads fall. It is not the experience of 75% of unique visitors. Good Core Web Vitals need LCP, INP, and CLS to each meet their own p75 threshold. A good LCP alone is not enough.

Lab and field results can be far apart. A lab test may measure an LCP of 18 seconds, while CrUX reports a p75 of 1.1 seconds. Also check the scope of a field result. URL-level data covers one page, while origin-level data combines page loads across a whole origin. So neither our homepage test nor an origin-level result measures a different ranking URL. Our article on lab versus field explains possible reasons and the limits of this comparison.

Not every agency has a value in that column. CrUX has eligibility requirements for users, URLs, and origins, including public discoverability and enough traffic. Of the 17 agencies in this edition, seven had a usable current value. The other ten and our reference row get a dash. A dash means no value was available from this lookup. It does not mean the site is fast or slow, and it does not tell us its traffic. These seven values are separate from the origin-level History API research.

Platform, DA and PA

We infer the platform from markers in each homepage’s source code, such as WordPress- or Next.js-specific files. This is an estimate, not a definitive identification: a customized platform or an agency’s own stack may leave no recognizable markers.

The “DA” column shows each domain’s Domain Authority, which Moz calculates from its link profile as a ranking-potential score from 1 to 100. We retrieve it through the Moz Links API on this edition’s measurement date. It is a third-party estimate, not a Google metric, and measures something different from lab performance.

The “PA” column shows the Page Authority of the page that actually ranks for “website laten maken”. That is usually a landing page or pricing article, not the homepage we lab-test. PA measures the link profile of that one URL. In this edition, PA ranges from 11 to 44, with the same Moz capture date and limitations as DA. In our earlier research, position correlated more strongly with PA than with any of the other factors. Read more in our article on how small agencies take on bigger competitors.

The ranking: web agencies on page 1

Businesses that build websites and appear in the top 10 in Belgium or the Netherlands, tested on the same day with the same mobile Lighthouse settings. Sorted by overall score. Measured on November 1, 2026 · Lighthouse (PageSpeed Insights API), mobile, three runs per website, median per value. Overall score = average of Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO. Domain Authority (DA) via Moz on November 1, 2026. Page Authority (PA) via Moz for the page ranking on this position, measured on November 1, 2026.

#
—	Straffe Sites reference	BE ##	100	100	100	100	100	3/3	1,090 ms	—	18	22	Astro
1	Conversal	BE #4	98	100	93	100	100	2/3	1,351 ms	2,463 ms	33	43	WordPress
2	Sabine Boogaard	NL #10	95	89	89	100	100	0/3	1,101 ms	—	19	23	WordPress
3	DYsign	BE #6	93	88	87	96	100	2/3	1,389 ms	—	8	12	WordPress
4	Website Laten Maken	BE #1	93	75	97	100	100	2/2	4,598 ms	—	13	23	Astro
5	KMO Shops	BE #5	91	83	87	92	100	1/3	2,414 ms	2,558 ms	32	24	WordPress
6	Dashed	NL #7	91	62	100	100	100	2/2	10,664 ms	—	16	20	—
7	Voorlopers	NL #6	88	60	92	100	100	0/2	10,034 ms	—	10	11	WordPress
8	Dtch. Digitals	NL #3	86	51	100	100	92	1/4	8,184 ms	1,346 ms	34	29	WordPress
9	Hostnet	NL #2	84	42	100	100	92	3/3	14,564 ms	1,125 ms	50	44	Next.js
10	Inspira	BE #3	83	46	88	96	100	1/2	18,407 ms	—	22	29	—
11	Whello	NL #1	83	40	95	96	100	2/2	15,532 ms	3,137 ms	31	27	Next.js
12	Bous Bous	BE #8	81	56	92	77	100	2/3	2,951 ms	—	6	26	Webflow
13	Adworkx	BE #7	80	52	96	73	100	3/3	22,169 ms	—	17	24	Wix
14	Studio NewMedia	NL #5	77	63	70	92	83	1/2	16,276 ms	—	17	35	—
15	Advice	NL #8	75	38	75	96	92	2/3	6,929 ms	—	25	19	WordPress
16	Swift Marketing	BE #9	70	31	85	77	85	1/4	21,676 ms	1,433 ms	13	21	—
17	Green Bananas	BE #2	65	32	82	54	92	2/3	22,665 ms	1,386 ms	24	30	WordPress

Outside the measurement: Reddit (forum thread (r/nederlands) — community platform, does not build websites); Heers (online marketing agency (paid search/SEO) without its own website-building service; the ranking URL is an informational blog post).

#
—	Straffe Sites reference	BE ##	100	98	100	100	100	3/3	2,182 ms	—	19	21	Astro
1	WJ Webdesign	NL #3	99	99	96	100	100	3/3	1,501 ms	—	15	39	Astro
2	ROXTAR	NL #6	96	85	97	100	100	2/2	4,053 ms	—	33	38	WordPress
3	Website Laten Maken	BE #5	91	74	89	100	100	1/2	4,608 ms	—	13	23	WordPress
4	Websteen	NL #7	89	65	97	92	100	3/3	11,571 ms	—	19	25	—
5	VHBP	NL #9	88	75	83	100	92	1/3	4,065 ms	—	18	34	WordPress
6	KMO Shops	BE #6	88	73	87	92	100	0/2	3,456 ms	2,306 ms	32	24	WordPress
7	Conversal	BE #1	88	71	87	100	92	2/3	18,151 ms	2,417 ms	33	43	WordPress
8	WebsiteDeal	BE #7	88	69	92	100	92	1/4	5,251 ms	—	2	33	WordPress
9	Stuurlui	NL #8	88	56	100	96	100	3/3	10,309 ms	1,294 ms	36	37	WordPress
10	Kreatix	BE #4	87	55	91	100	100	1/3	13,699 ms	—	25	32	WordPress
11	Inspira	BE #2	83	46	88	96	100	1/2	20,817 ms	—	23	29	—
12	Aslan Webtech	NL #2	83	44	88	100	100	2/3	12,685 ms	—	8	42	WordPress
13	Riseweb	BE #9	82	40	90	96	100	2/2	12,076 ms	—	10	13	WordPress
14	Adworkx	BE #8	80	49	96	73	100	3/3	22,572 ms	—	16	24	Wix
15	Yourhosting	NL #1	80	29	92	100	100	1/3	19,452 ms	2,141 ms	70	49	WordPress
16	VrijdagOnline	NL #5	79	44	88	92	92	1/2	19,586 ms	—	26	40	—
17	Swift Marketing	BE #10	75	32	82	100	85	1/4	24,447 ms	—	13	21	WordPress
18	Tasmanic	NL #10	67	31	56	96	85	0/2	12,636 ms	991 ms	31	21	WordPress
19	Green Bananas	BE #3	63	24	82	54	92	1/3	23,246 ms	—	24	30	WordPress

This earlier edition keeps the participant measurements; the saved reference measurement belongs to this edition. The excluded list appears on the current edition only.

#
—	Straffe Sites reference	BE ##	99	97	100	100	100	3/3	2,106 ms	—	18	17	Astro
1	WJ Webdesign	NL #2	98	96	96	100	100	3/3	1,691 ms	—	15	39	Astro
2	Stuurlui	NL #8	97	92	100	96	100	3/3	3,160 ms	1,214 ms	35	37	WordPress
3	Zenjoy	BE #7	96	82	100	100	100	3/3	3,044 ms	—	24	26	—
4	Creative Corner	NL #10	88	62	95	96	100	2/2	9,868 ms	—	57	25	WordPress
5	Conversal	BE #2	87	70	87	100	92	2/3	18,152 ms	1,087 ms	33	43	WordPress
6	Riseweb	BE #9	86	59	90	96	100	2/2	11,721 ms	—	10	13	WordPress
7	WebsiteDeal	BE #10	86	59	92	100	92	2/3	9,445 ms	—	1	33	WordPress
8	Websteen	NL #5	85	52	97	92	100	3/3	11,014 ms	—	19	25	—
9	Webstijn	NL #3	84	51	88	96	100	1/2	15,376 ms	—	15	15	WordPress
10	Scrolla	NL #9	84	46	95	96	100	3/3	10,631 ms	1,308 ms	24	25	WordPress
11	Kreatix	BE #3	83	41	91	100	100	1/3	7,501 ms	—	25	32	WordPress
12	KMO Shops	BE #5	82	47	87	92	100	0/2	4,801 ms	2,510 ms	32	24	WordPress
13	2manydots	NL #7	82	39	94	96	100	1/3	14,484 ms	2,193 ms	26	38	WordPress
14	Adworkx	BE #6	79	43	99	73	100	3/3	21,218 ms	—	12	24	Wix
15	VrijdagOnline	NL #4	79	43	88	92	92	1/2	12,226 ms	—	25	40	—
16	Inspira	BE #1	78	27	88	96	100	1/2	19,444 ms	—	22	29	—
17	Swift Marketing	BE #8	76	38	82	100	85	1/3	26,428 ms	—	13	24	WordPress
18	Yourhosting	NL #1	74	28	92	77	100	1/3	21,393 ms	2,085 ms	70	49	WordPress
19	Green Bananas	BE #4	66	35	82	54	92	2/3	18,753 ms	1,629 ms	23	30	WordPress

This earlier edition keeps the participant measurements; the saved reference measurement belongs to this edition. The excluded list appears on the current edition only.

What stands out

Performance varies wildly

The November 2026 edition covers 17 web agencies: nine from the Belgian top 10 and eight from the Dutch top 10. Hostnet appears on page 1 in both countries (Netherlands #2, Belgium #10) and is counted once, under the Netherlands. A Reddit thread (Netherlands #4) and a marketing agency without its own website-building service (Heers, Netherlands #9) are excluded. The key figures of this edition:

The median mobile Performance score is 56 out of 100.
Scores range from 31 to 100.
Only one agency scores above 90 on mobile.
The highest Lab LCP is 22.7 seconds.

We explore how low lab scores can coexist with high rankings in why slow websites rank high.

Accessibility and SEO score higher

Accessibility and SEO scores are higher than Performance scores: no agency scores below 70 in either category. The agencies generally do better on checks such as image alt text, heading structure, and metadata than on loading performance. That does not tell us which optimization would help each site most; image size, JavaScript, and server response need separate investigation. Lab results also differ sharply from field data: among the seven agencies with current CrUX observations, Lab LCP was up to 16.4x the CrUX LCP (p75).

Eight WordPress sites, one Astro site

Of the 17 homepages, eight show WordPress markers, two show Next.js markers, and one each shows Astro, Webflow, and Wix markers; four have no unambiguous stack signature. The Astro site ranks fourth with an overall score of 93 out of 100, while the leader (98) runs on WordPress. We use Astro for this site and build Astro websites for clients. One result does not establish that a platform caused the score.

Agentic Browsing is still young

In Agentic Browsing, five of the seventeen homepages pass every check, while two pass none. The category checks whether AI agents can read and use a website, including its accessibility tree, layout stability, and llms.txt file. We expect this column to become more useful as AI-assisted browsing develops, but it is not part of our overall score.

Authority does not predict speed

Hostnet has the highest DA (50) and a Performance score of 42. Website Laten Maken holds position 1 in Google Belgium with DA 13. Across the sample, DA ranges from 6 to 50, with a median of 19, and its rank correlation with our overall lab score is nearly zero (+0.04). In this sample, a stronger domain link profile does not consistently go with a higher lab score. We explore the implications for smaller businesses in small agency, big competitors.

What does this mean for your choice?

Which web agency is the best depends on more than speed: budget, platform, guidance, and maintenance matter too. A slow agency website does not automatically mean its client websites are slow. Still, if an agency sells speed and technical quality, it is reasonable to ask how its own site performs. Use this table as a starting point: ask about the results, weigh what a website costs against the quality, and look at relevant client work too.

Our own site appears as a reference row at the top, tested on the same day with the same runs and median calculation. It is a static Astro site. For content-driven sites, that is our preferred approach: serve prebuilt pages through a CDN and limit the work the browser has to do.

Want to test your own site the same way? Our guide to lab versus field data explains what a PageSpeed score does and doesn’t tell you.

What changed since October

The search results changed sharply this month. In the Netherlands, an entirely new group is on page 1: Whello (position 1), Hostnet, Dtch. Digitals, Studio NewMedia, Voorlopers, Dashed, Advice, and Sabine Boogaard. Yourhosting, Aslan Webtech, WJ Webdesign, VrijdagOnline, ROXTAR, Websteen, Stuurlui, VHBP, and Tasmanic dropped out of the top 10, so last edition’s leader, WJ Webdesign, is no longer included. In Belgium, DYsign (position 6) and Bous Bous (position 8) are new, while Kreatix, WebsiteDeal, and Riseweb dropped out. The number of participants fell from 19 to 17. Most rank changes therefore come from the changing cohort, not just from scores. We retrieve search results through a data center connection, so they can fluctuate.

Of the seven agencies included in both editions, Conversal made the biggest jump: from rank 7 to 1, with its Performance score rising from 71 to 100. KMO Shops improved Performance from 73 to 83 (rank 6 to 5), and Green Bananas from 24 to 32 (rank 19 to 17). Swift Marketing lost 5 points on the overall score but still moved from 17 to 16 because the cohort is smaller. Website Laten Maken slipped one place, from 3 to 4.

In the Belgian search results themselves, Website Laten Maken took over position 1 (up from 5). Conversal fell from position 1 to 4, and Green Bananas rose from 3 to 2. Next measurement: early December.

Frequently asked questions

How do you run this benchmark?

We test each homepage three times using the mobile settings in Google's PageSpeed Insights API. For each metric, we report the median of those runs. The table includes the measurement date.

Why isn't Straffe Sites itself in the ranking?

We don't currently rank on page 1 for this search query, so participating would skew the comparison. That is why we measure our own homepage in exactly the same way and show it as a marked reference row at the top of the table.

What is the overall score?

Our overall score is the average of the four Lighthouse categories scored from 0 to 100: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. Agentic Browsing uses a different scale, so we show it separately as the number of checks passed out of the total.

What does the Agentic Browsing score mean?

This category checks how well AI agents can read and use a website, including its accessibility tree, layout stability, and llms.txt file. It reports checks passed rather than a weighted score from 0 to 100, so we use notation such as 3/3.

What does the CrUX LCP (p75) column mean?

It shows the 75th percentile of Largest Contentful Paint from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX), which collects data from eligible Chrome users. Within a 28-day window, 75% of measured page loads had an LCP at or below that value. Ten of the seventeen agencies had no usable value in this edition, so they get a dash. LCP alone does not prove good Core Web Vitals.

What does the DA column mean?

DA stands for Domain Authority, a score from 1 to 100 that Moz calculates from a domain's link profile. It is a third-party estimate of ranking potential, not a Google metric. We include it to compare link profiles with lab performance; in this sample, the two scores have almost no rank correlation.

Which web agency is the best?

That depends on what you need: budget, platform, guidance, and who maintains the site afterward. This benchmark measures one thing: the speed of each agency's own homepage, not their client work. Use the table to ask focused questions, and ask for measured results from client websites.

Why isn't my web agency on the list?

The list follows the top 10 organic results in Belgium and the Netherlands for the query 'website laten maken'. When page 1 changes, the benchmark changes with it at the next round. Businesses that don't build websites themselves, such as comparison platforms or forums, are deliberately left out.

Why is my agency's score different from our own test results?

Lab scores can vary with test timing, location, and the campaigns or scripts loading at the time. Our median of three runs on one day is a snapshot. You can request a new measurement through the contact page.

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Hosting & maintenance

AI & automation

Benchmark: how fast are the web agencies