Following our recent major web hosting upgrade, tests have shown that Primary Image currently has the fastest web hosting in Southend compared to the websites of other leading web design companies in the local area.
The web server response times from the top 25 web design agencies (as ranked by Google) in Southend-on-Sea, in Essex, were recorded by an independent third-party (Pingdom).
We found out that:
- Primary Image came out in first place on 0.111 seconds;
- This was followed by two other companies coming in under 0.2 seconds;
- Out of the 25 web design companies analysed, only eight could manage a response time of under 0.5 seconds;
- Ten companies took over one second for their web servers to respond;
- The longest time was by Southend-WebDesign(.co.uk), whose response time was 4.09 seconds;
- The average web server response time for these companies offering web hosting in Southend was 1.06 seconds.
Mike Pead, Creative Director of Primary Image, says:
Having good quality web hosting ensures your website loads as quickly as possible for your visitors. Research shows that a slow website does deter visitors, plus search engines are also known to use website loading speed as one of their ranking factors.
Too many web design companies cram their servers full of websites and use old-fashioned systems to save money, which has a detrimental effect on the performance of those web servers. We’ve made sure that we have invested in an exceptionally powerful UK-based hosting setup to ensure the very best service to our customers.
What is surprising from these results is that some of the largest web design companies in the Southend-on-Sea area are actually the ones that performed the worst, so this proves that you should do your research before picking a web host!
The tests were carried out on Monday, 21st April 2014, between 15:00 and 15:30, and measured the time taken to load the home page HTML source code, including DNS, Connect, Wait and Receive times. The top 25 companies were chosen from the highest ranking companies on Google. There are other factors that could affect the response times, such as the length of HTML document, whether gZip is enabled, whether caching is in use, etc, that we could not factor into these tests, so do bear this in mind too. Images and other file resources were not included in the loading time tests as this wouldn’t provide a good like-for-like comparison, as every website design is very different, so we concentrated only on the delivery of the HTML page code.

Mike founded Primary Image in 2010. He specialises in the WordPress website platform and speaks regularly at national web design conferences. Mike became a member (MCIPR) of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in 2015.
Comments
Looks like we beat you! 🙂
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/5XJHi/speedygeek.net
Hi Mark – we did the tests on only the HTML file so it’s more of a fairer like-for-like comparison between the various company websites (as the different sites will have varying use of images and other file resources that get downloaded on a visitor’s computer), so the test was more about measuring server response time performance, than the webpage design as a whole.
I’ve just done a cold connection (first attempt) on both of our websites this afternoon and it came up 250ms (yours) and just a fraction quicker 239ms (ours), then with a warm connection (second attempt a short time later) 139ms (yours) and 128ms (ours).
So it’s fair to say we’re very evenly matched (with Primary Image just a very tiny bit faster! 😛 ), but we have to give credit where it’s due and you certainly have a great setup there to record those kind of results. (Also worth pointing out these tests I’ve done here put your server response times faster than in the archived speed test link you posted above – which was 327ms for the HTML file! 🙂 ).
Interestingly I’ve also just repeated some tests on the top five fastest companies from our survey in April and they’ve all dropped back quite a bit (e.g. the second placed company before is now six times slower). There’s obviously lots of variables though that can influence things.
Very impressed with your 100/100 grade in Pingdom for your webpage optimisation!
Happy web speeding! 🙂
Mike