Since we recently launched our new website, we decided to do a little experiment.

We used webpagetest.org to analyze the page load times of over 100 marketing agency websites here in Arizona. We tested our own website as well. And you know what? Out of all those sites, the XAQ10 website loaded the fastest!

The speed and performance of our website reflects the technical expertise of the website, so it’s a point of pride that our website performs so well during testing.

How we conducted the test

1. First we searched for every marketing agency, SEO agency, and web development agency in Arizona. We found a list of a few hundred, but some didn’t have an offices in Arizona, so those were excluded.

2. Second, we used webpagetest.org to test their pagespeed.

   The settings we used were as simple and fair as possible:

   • High speed connection: LTE 12MBPS
   • 3 tests for each site, choosing the fastest of three tests.
   • Ranking page load speed based on the time to “first view"
     • "First view” specifically measures how long until the first “paint” of meaningful content

Why is first view a good metric to test page load speed?

”First view,” when testing page load speed refers to how long it takes for the initial content to become visible to the user when they first load the page.

Specifically, it measures the time from when the user makes the initial request to when the browser has rendered enough content for them to start visually engaging with the page.

This includes:

• The initial HTML response from the server
• Necessary CSS and JavaScript files
• Initial content rendering by the browser

The test results:

Who has the fastest agency website in Arizona?

XAQ10.com!

The XAQ10 website loaded the fastest of all the Arizona based marketing agency websites tested. SEO optimized, speed optimized, and beautifully designed and developed by our founder.

Honorable mentions

We’re proud to share the winner’s circle with a select group of agencies who have taken the time and care to optimize their websites for user experience, SEO, and obviously loading speed.

Rising Ranks Digital - This digital marketing agency based in Tempe had a solid load time of 1.9s. Surprisingly fast for a Wix based website.

Get Quirked - A digital agency focused on healthcare marketing. They had a quick load time of 2.2s. Looks like their custom WordPress site is tuned for speed.

Helix House - Helix House is a cool marketing agency based in Phoenix. Their Webflow site loaded surprisingly fast, coming in at 2.3s.

Ave 25 - An agency focused on Mexican business marketing. Their Modx CMS based site loads beautifully in under 2.5s. Speed optimization is clearly a priority.

Phoenix SEO Geek - As an SEO agency, they understand the importance of site speed. Their WordPress site loaded in a speedy 2.6 seconds.

The Slowest Agency Websites in Arizona

Mountain Mojo Group - This Flagstaff based agency isn’t going to win this race on one ski. Mojo clocked in at a dismal 9 seconds until largest content paint. Their WordPress site might not make it back up the bunny hill at that pace.

AZ Central Local IQ - The might be local, but their IQ needs some work, they also crawled in at 9 seconds before visually complete. Ouch!

The James Agency - They might be curious, but I’m curious why their site took 8 long seconds to load.

Maximo Branding - With not a whole lot going on above the fold, you’d expect better than 8 seconds. This branding agency site could use a tune up.

Nuanced Media - Despite the nuanced name, their site slogged in at brazen 9 seconds to largest content paint.

Kitchen Sink Creative - Last, but not least, tests on Kitchen Sink Studio’s site show a crawling 13 seconds for their site to load fully. I suppose they loaded everything but the kitchen sink.

So how did we build such a fast website?

The answer is, with a lot of love and care… and Jamstack web development.

What is Jamstack?

Jamstack is a modern web development architecture that generates static HTML pages at build time. This makes the sites incredibly fast, secure, and SEO-friendly.

Some of the key benefits of Jamstack:

• Speed: As the tests showed, Jamstack sites load extremely fast.
• SEO: Search engines and SEOs love Jamstack sites because they have excellent page speed scores.
• Easy to Edit: Jamstack uses APIs can fetch content from headless CMSs.

However, Jamstack does have some drawbacks compared to traditional CMS-driven sites:

• It’s not a “no code” solution: Jamstack sites do require web development work.
• Out of the box, there is no CMS for editing: you have to integrate something like TinaCMS or Strapi.

But with the right CMS configuration, Jamstack sites can be edited easily without needing to touch code. We’ve used Tina CMS and Strapi for some of our projects to great effect.

Jamstack web development offers huge performance benefits and our own blazing fast website proves it! If speed matters for your marketing site, Jamstack is the way to go.