Benchmark: how fast are the website builders

Why this benchmark exists

Every website builder promises speed. On the search results page for “website laten maken” in Belgium and the Netherlands, the word appears in virtually every ad and title. Yet nowhere is there an independent measurement of how those same agencies’ own websites perform. This benchmark fills that gap: no opinions, no reviews, just the same test on every homepage, repeated monthly and fully transparent.

The comparison is fair by design. Every website in the table was tested on the same day, with the same mobile Lighthouse test, three runs per website, median per value. Whoever is at the top earned it. Whoever is at the bottom has every opportunity to climb next month — and that is exactly the point.

How we measure

Which builders participate

Every month we pull the top 10 organic results for “website laten maken” in Google Belgium and Google Netherlands, and measure the homepage of every party that actually builds websites. Comparison platforms that don’t build websites themselves fall outside the measurement, so we only compare real builders. Behind the country code in the table is the organic position where we found that party on the SERP: NL #1 means position 1 in Google Netherlands on the measurement date.

The lab scores

Per website we run three full Lighthouse tests through the PageSpeed Insights API on mobile, and show the median per value. We measure five categories: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO — each a score from 0 to 100 — and Agentic Browsing, which still works with a pass ratio (like 3/3) because Google is still actively developing that category. The overall score per website builder is the average of the four 0-100 scores; Agentic Browsing is shown separately, because a pass ratio is not comparable to a weighted score.

The field column

Next to those lab scores, this edition also adds the “Field LCP (p75)” column: the Largest Contentful Paint as real visitors experience it. That value does not come from our test runs, but from Google’s CrUX field data: anonymously collected performance from real Chrome visitors, bundled over 28 days. The p75 is the value where three quarters of visits were faster — Google uses the same threshold for the Core Web Vitals. An agency can have a slow lab LCP (18 seconds) and at the same time a fast field LCP (1.1 seconds); why that gap appears is covered in the article on lab versus field.

Not every website builder has a value in that column. CrUX only collects data from domains with enough real Chrome visits; of the 19 agencies in this edition, seven pass that threshold. The other twelve — and our own reference row — get a dash: no “slow” or “fast”, simply no measurement possible. That is not an accusation, just an honest limit of what public field data can show.

Platform and DA

The “indicated platform” column we derive from markers in each homepage’s source code, such as WordPress- or Next.js-specific files. It is an indication, not a certainty — an agency can fully customize a platform or use its own stack that leaves no traces.

The “DA” column, finally, shows each domain’s Domain Authority as Moz calculates it from the link profile: a predictive 1-to-100 score for ranking potential. We pull the value through the Moz Links API on this edition’s measurement date. It is an external estimate, not a Google measurement — which is exactly why it is useful next to our lab scores.

The ranking — every website builder on page 1, measured

Every party from the top 10 in Belgium and the Netherlands that builds websites itself, tested on the same day with the same mobile Lighthouse run. Sorted by overall score. Measured on September 10, 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 September 11, 2026.

What stands out

Performance varies wildly

This first edition measures 19 website builders: ten from the Belgian top 10 and nine from the Dutch one (the comparison platform at position 6 in the Netherlands doesn’t build websites itself and therefore falls outside the measurement). The spread on Performance is large: the median sits at 47 out of 100, with outliers from 27 to 96. Only two agencies score above 90 on mobile — while virtually everyone on this list sells speed. The slowest Largest Contentful Paint in the table: 26.4 seconds on mobile. Why the slowest agencies still sit at the top of Google is what we dig into in why slow websites rank high.

Accessibility and SEO score higher

Accessibility and SEO score better than Performance across the board: no agency drops below 82 there, while performance varies wildly. Apparently audit-style checks (alt texts, heading structure, meta information) are now well covered at most builders, while the harder jobs — image weight, JavaScript volume, server response — stay open. You see the same pattern in Core Web Vitals measurements: the easy points get picked up, the structural gains stay untouched. And that lab score says less about ranking than you’d think: for the seven agencies with real-user data, field LCP was up to 16.7x lower than the lab test suggested.

Thirteen times WordPress, once Astro

Of the 19 measured homepages, 13 run on WordPress, one on Wix and one on Astro; for four we find no unambiguous stack signature. That one Astro site tops the ranking with 98 out of 100 — the same platform this site runs on and the one we also build Astro websites with. One data point is of course no proof, but it underlines why we make that choice.

Agentic Browsing is still young

Agentic Browsing, the newest category, shows how young this field still is: eight of the nineteen homepages pass with a full ratio, one scores zero. The category measures whether a website is machine-readable for AI agents — including the accessibility tree, layout stability, and the presence of llms.txt. As more visitors land through AI assistants, we expect this column to gain weight quickly.

Authority does not predict speed

The DA column puts the speed story in perspective. Yourhosting combines the highest authority (DA 70) with the worst lab score in the Netherlands; WJ Webdesign sits at position 2 with DA 15, right behind them. The median is 24, with outliers from 1 to 70, and the rank correlation between DA and lab score is nearly zero (+0.02). Speed and link profile do not predict each other: scoring on one says nothing about the other. How small agencies turn that conclusion into strategy is in small agency, big competitors.

What does this mean for your choice?

A slow agency website doesn’t automatically mean slow client websites. But if speed and technical quality are in the pitch, you may expect the agency’s own showcase to prove that quality. This table gives you an objective starting point: ask an agency for its scores, weigh the costs against the quality and choose deliberately.

We stand in the table ourselves as a reference at the top, with the same yardstick: same day, same runs, same median. Our own site is statically built with Astro, and that is no coincidence: for content-driven sites, a static build on a good CDN is still the fastest route to high scores.

Next measurement

The benchmark refreshes every month. When page 1 changes, new names appear in the table and dropouts leave it. We note risers and fallers in this section, so you can follow the trend. We publish the full measurement data and the method used transparently — so you can verify how every score came about.