The Single Page Analysis tool was first developed as an internal troubleshooting tool. Today, it is a key feature in Sitebulb, and still serves as the perfect tool for diagnosis if you are running into problems with your crawl.

Here are some key issues you may want to diagnose with SPA.

Sitebulb checks the validity of your start URL at various points of the setup process, starting as soon as you input your start URL in the New Project screen. At various points, you may encounter the issue of unexpected or unclear HTTP responses.

If you run into a pre-audit or domain resolution failure when creating a new project, the SPA tool can help you diagnose the issue and find the correct settings for a successful audit. Here are a couple of common examples:

Your start URL needs to return an HTTP status code of 200 Success so you can correctly set up a New Project. If that is not the case, you can use the SPA tool to gather further details about the HTTP response of your URL:

While most website servers will return a successful response when using Sitebulb’s default UA, you may occasionally run into websites with particularly strict authorization or protection measures in place.

In many cases, these issues can be mitigated by simply changing the User Agent to a pre-whitelisted or authorized UA string.

The SPA is the perfect tool to efficiently test the website response to different user agents without having to set up and run a new crawl for each test. Simply use the Settings button to open up the settings drop-down and select your user agent before checking the URL again.

Once you’ve got some results, look at the response code in the Audit overview or check the Screenshots tab to see if the content is rendered correctly.

If your test URL returns the expected status code and page content, you can move on to testing the same UA in an audit.

Sitebulb provides the option to choose between the HTTP and Chrome Crawler when setting up new audits. The HTTP crawler is faster, but if you are dealing with websites that render content with JavaScript, you will need to make sure you are using the correct crawler to gather accurate audit results.

The SPA tool can help you determine whether your website renders content with JS.

Simply run your start URL or key pages through the SPA and check the Response vs. Render results to understand whether any of the page content is created, modified, or deleted by JS.

While Sitebulb’s default Chrome Crawler setting works for most websites, you may come across cases where the audit results are inaccurate or some page content is missing. This is often caused by issues with page rendering, which can be addressed by adjusting audit settings.

Use the Single Page Analysis tool to test out different configurations of the Advanced Chrome Crawler settings, and use the resulting reports to analyze whether the page is rendering correctly with the selected settings. The screenshots tab is particularly useful for this.

You’ll find more information about what each of these settings means under the Crawler Settings reference documentation.

For more help troubleshooting rendering issues and missing content, check out this dedicated doc.