Test a Web Design Agency Before You Sign

How we measured, and why the vantage point matters

On 16 August 2026 we requested the homepage of 26 sites appearing in the top twenty results for three commercial queries, from a Hetzner host in Helsinki. For each one we recorded HTML weight, the number of script and stylesheet files the page pulls in, six security response headers, and any version strings the server volunteers.

Server response time is deliberately absent from the table below. Our measuring point sits in Finland and most of these sites are hosted inside Iran, so that figure would mostly measure the route between the two rather than the quality of the hosting. Every other column is independent of where you measure from. HTML weight is the same number anywhere on earth.

The numbers

Twenty five of the 26 returned a 200. The remaining one, nishaweb.com, returned a 500 Internal Server Error. On the day we looked, an agency Google shows for its own core keyword had a homepage that would not render.

That heaviest figure deserves a pause. Two megabytes of HTML means a visitor's browser parses two million characters before it paints anything, and that is before a single image or font arrives. Compressed, the same page moves about 160 KB across the network, so it is not expensive on a data plan. It is expensive on a phone's processor, which is the part nobody checks.

Five checks you can run yourself in twenty minutes

None of these need a paid tool and all of them can be done before you sign anything.

Open their homepage on a phone, on mobile data. Not the office wifi. If the company that will build your site cannot make its own site feel quick on a normal connection, that is the standard you are buying.

View the page source and search for meta name="generator". A WordPress version sitting there means nobody touched the default configuration. Two agencies in our list did exactly this, and both announced 7.0.4.

Measure speed with Google's tool, not the score they show you. PageSpeed Insights will show real field data from actual visitors when a site has enough traffic, and that is a different and more useful thing than a lab score.

Ask what the site will be built on, and put the answer in the contract. A pre-made theme, a custom theme, and a bespoke build are three different products at three different prices. We separate the figures in our breakdown of what a site actually costs to build.

Ask whose name the hosting, the domain and the admin access will be in after handover. This one question prevents more trouble than any technical question on this list.

What this test does not prove

None of these numbers say the agency is a bad designer. A studio can leave its own site untouched for years and still deliver clean work for clients, and that genuinely happens. What the test reveals is the default standard: what gets done when no client is looking.

A fair word about the security headers

One point of fairness here. On shared hosting a designer often cannot add several of those six at all, because they have no access to the web server configuration. That is a hosting limit rather than a failure of craft, and we have written separately about the point where shared hosting stops being enough.

Questions that come up when choosing

Which is the best web design company?

There is no single answer, and anyone who hands you one name is selling something. The answerable version is narrower: which company has already built the thing you want, and can show it to you.

Does a lower price mean lower quality?

Not necessarily, but a price difference always surfaces somewhere. Usually in the hours spent on speed and structure, because that is the part a client never sees at handover.

How do I know the portfolio is really theirs?

Open the live URLs and look in the source for the theme name. If ten case studies all sit on one identical off-the-shelf theme, what was sold was configuration rather than design.

We hold this page to the same criteria and the figures behind it are public. If you would rather we did the work, a site that still holds up when someone inspects it after handover is what we build. If you go elsewhere, run these five checks on whoever you pick.