What a web design or development company's own website publishes about itself, measured on six Singapore firms

If you are looking at web design and web development company websites to work out which firm to hire, the useful things on those sites are not the ones you look at. They are five records you can read in about fifteen minutes: whether the firm publishes a price, what its own site does when you ask for a page that does not exist, what it says to AI crawlers in robots.txt, whether it publishes an llms.txt, and whether the portfolio links still resolve. We ran four of those five checks on six Singapore web and marketing firms on 28 October 2026 and the results are below, with the method, so you can repeat it on any shortlist.

Google Keyword Planner reports 10 searches a month in Singapore for this group of phrasings, harvested 26 October 2026 against geo 2702. The phrasing people use is "best web design company websites" or "best web development agency websites", which reads like a request for inspiration and is usually a request for evidence.

We rank nobody here on how the site looks, deliberately

Best looking can only be settled on taste, and a page that ranks six firms by taste is one person's opinion dressed as research. Everything below is a record with a status code or a file behind it, taken on one afternoon, and every one of them is something you can check yourself in a browser. Where a firm published nothing we say it published nothing, which is an answer rather than a gap.

What six Singapore firms' own sites published on 28 October 2026

Site	Price published in the page we read	llms.txt	robots.txt	Body served on a 404
awebstar.com.sg	Yes. SEO plans at S$800, S$1,400 and S$2,300 a month; web design packages at S$1,494, S$2,584 and S$4,494	200, 11 KB, text/plain	200, 388 bytes	935 bytes
oom.com.sg	Yes, as ranges in an article: S$300 to over S$3,000 a month, with freelance at S$200 to S$400	200, 29 KB, text/plain	200, 107 bytes	178 KB
firstpagedigital.sg	Yes, a full ladder from 200 to 10,000 a month, printed with a bare dollar sign	200, 21 KB, text/plain	200, 2.2 KB	127 KB
verzdesign.com	Yes. Corporate from 2,500 and ecommerce from 5,000, printed with a bare dollar sign	200, 3.8 KB, text/plain	200, 1.2 KB	115 KB
subraa.com	No figure in the website design package page we read	200, 18 KB, text/plain	200, 124 bytes	172 KB
impossible.sg	No figure in the two pages we read	200, 360 KB, text/plain	200, 69 bytes	229 KB

Three findings come out of that table, and the third is the one that changes how you read a portfolio.

Finding one, four of six publish a number and only one publishes it in Singapore dollars

Four of the six serve a figure a buyer can read without an enquiry. Only Awebstar attaches the Singapore dollar symbol to it. First Page Digital's ladder and Verz Design's starting prices print a bare dollar sign on pages written for a Singapore audience, so the currency is inferred rather than read. That is a small thing for a human and a large thing for any software reading the page, including the assistants that now answer "what does a website cost in Singapore" for people who never visit the site at all.

Two of the six publish nothing. That is a legitimate commercial position and it has a cost: a buyer comparing five firms in an afternoon can place four of them on a sheet and has to open an email thread for the fifth.

Finding two, all six publish an llms.txt and they are not the same kind of file

An llms.txt is a plain text file at the root of a site that sets out what the site contains for large language models to read. On 28 October 2026 all six of these sites served one with HTTP 200 and a content type of text/plain, which is a higher adoption rate than we expected in any market.

The files differ enormously, and the size tells you which kind you are looking at. Verz Design's is 3.8 KB and reads as a hand written summary: "Verz Design Singapore" followed by a description of the company. Subraa's is 18 KB and declares its own version and review date, "Version: 2.0, Last Updated: September 2026". Impossible's is 360 KB and opens by stating that it was "Generated by All in One SEO v5.0.1.1", which is a plugin dumping the site's index rather than a curated summary. None of those is wrong. A hand written one is a statement of positioning; a generated one is a sitemap in prose.

For a buyer, this is a cheap read on whether the firm is actually working on AI search or simply has a plugin that does it. Open the file. If it is a curated page list with descriptions, somebody wrote it. If it is two hundred pages of generated index, a plugin wrote it. Either way the firm should be able to tell you which, and the answer is a good opening question on a sales call.

Finding three, five of six serve a full styled page when the page does not exist

This is the finding that matters most when you are reading a portfolio. We asked each site for a path that cannot exist, and all six correctly returned HTTP 404. Five of them returned a complete, styled page of over 100 KB with it: 178 KB, 229 KB, 127 KB, 172 KB and 115 KB. Only Awebstar returned a small 935 byte response.

Which means that if you click a case study in a portfolio and land on a page that looks like a working page, you have learned nothing. The site looks the same whether the content is there or gone. The only way to tell is the status code, and the quickest way to read it is your browser's network tab, or an online header checker, or simply noticing that the content on the page has nothing to do with the link you clicked.

The same trap caught us while collecting this data. Four of the six sites returned a 404 for the obvious URL we guessed for their service page: a hundred and seventy kilobytes of styled HTML, with navigation, and no article. The real pages were at different paths, found by reading the links on the homepage. Guessing a URL from the service name failed more often than it worked.

How to run the same check on three firms in fifteen minutes

1. Read the homepage links, not the address bar. Find the service page from the navigation rather than typing a path you expect to exist.
2. Ask for a page that cannot exist, such as the domain followed by a nonsense word. Note whether you get a plain error or a full page, because that tells you how to read every broken link afterwards.
3. Open the portfolio and click four case studies. If any of them lands on something unrelated or on the homepage, you have found a dead reference in a sales document.
4. Read the robots.txt at the root. It is a plain text file and it tells you whether the firm has an opinion about AI crawlers at all. Our separate measurement of twenty nine Singapore suppliers' robots files sets out what to look for line by line.
5. Read the llms.txt at the root, if there is one, and decide whether a person or a plugin produced it.

If you want the broader version of this argument, our page on what world best web design company means for a Singapore buyer sets out five checkable records including company registration and whether portfolio sites are still live.

Questions about judging a web agency by its own website

Does a great agency website mean great work?

It means the firm can produce a good site for a client with full control of the brief, the budget and the deadline, which is the easiest version of the job. The records above are better evidence because they are about habits rather than about one artefact.

Should I worry if an agency's site is slow?

Measure it rather than feel it, with a public tool, and then ask about it. A firm that knows its own score and can tell you why is a better sign than a fast site nobody can explain.

What does it mean if an agency publishes no price at all?

That it sells by conversation, which is common at the custom end of this market. Treat it as a cost in your own process, not as a warning, and ask for a figure range on the first call so you can keep your comparison sheet honest.

Is an llms.txt worth anything to me as a buyer?

As a hiring signal, yes, in the narrow sense that it shows whether the firm is doing this work on its own site. As a ranking factor, treat it as unsettled and judge the firm on what it can explain rather than on the file's presence.

Why check the 404 page before the portfolio?

Because the 404 behaviour tells you whether a broken portfolio link will look broken. On five of the six sites we read, it will not.

The record these six sites cannot show you

Everything above is a record a firm publishes about itself. There is one record about these firms that none of them holds: which of them an assistant names when a Singapore buyer asks for a web design company, and which page of theirs the answer was built from. That answer is assembled from their published pages and from third party lists, it differs between assistants, and it is the version of their reputation that a buyer who never opens six browser tabs will actually see. It is measurable in the same first party way as everything in the table above, and the product we build, AI Knows Us, exists to turn it into one more column on a table like the one above.