Auditing Performance & Mobile Friendly with Sitebulb

Performance metrics are at the foundation of Technical SEO. Ensuring that your website is fast and reliable has wide-ranging effects, from organic performance to good user experience and better conversion rates.

Here’s how to review your website performance in line with your Technical SEO Audit, and find key points of action for improvement with Sitebulb.

The Performance audit is not enabled by default. To audit performance with Sitebulb, you will need to choose the Chrome Crawler, then enable the Performance & Mobile Friendly report in your Audit Settings > Audit Data.

The Performance Audit is a resource-intensive check. When Performance is enabled, extra processing time is added to each URL, as Sitebulb checks all the necessary metrics. This will, in turn, impact the speed and completion time of your crawl.

On the other hand, when performance is enabled, Sitebulb needs to download and save every resource URL in order to find on your pages, in order to accurately report on their performance, which means that your audit will considerably increase in size.

To ensure your audit is as fast and efficient as possible, we have some common recommendations on how to set up your audit.

First, think about the size of the website you are crawling. The speed and size concerns outlined above may not apply to smaller websites. But, as you deal with bigger sites, you may want to consider setting up a separate Project when auditing Performance.

Performance issues tend to be common across pages with the same templates/underlying HTML. As such, analysing a selection of key pages may be enough to find these bigger trends and opportunities for performance optimisation.

This may look like:

Once you have a clear idea of the scope of your performance Audit, go ahead and set up a new Project. Set your project name and start URL, then move on to the Audit Settings page, where you will need to:

For more key insights into auditing Performance with Sitebulb, check out the corresponding documentation in our Help Centre:

As it crawls, Sitebulb collects the Web Vitals metrics for a sample of your pages - by default, this is 10%. The results are aggregated and presented in your Performance report.

In the Overview tab, you will find a dedicated graph for each metric:

For each metric, your pages are broken down into three segments: Poor, Needs Improvement, and Good, based on the metric benchmarks outlined by Lighthouse. Click on the corresponding segment to jump to a URL List of the affected pages.

In the HTML Templates tab in your performance report, you’ll find a breakdown of the web vitals performance scores across all sampled URLs, averaged by HTML template. This view allows you to quickly identify and prioritise the areas of your site that require attention, as pages with the same template are likely to present similar performance issues.

When Performance is enabled, Sitebulb will run the Lighthouse ruleset (Opportunities and Diagnostics) across every single web page crawled. If any of your crawled pages fail these tests, they will be flagged under the corresponding Hint in the Performance Hints list:

You can explore these insights further by using the View URLs button to jump into a list of the affected pages.

You’ll notice that some hints also include a View Resources button, which allows you to view the affected resource files.

As a priority, you can look out for Critical hints, like:

Image Optimisation Hints:

And the JS and CSS minification checks:

Mobile-friendly checks are carried out by default when the Performance & Mobile Friendly report is enabled.

The Mobile Friendly report is composed of a series of insights presented in the form of a Hints list. These highlight key issues with the responsiveness of your pages, including but not limited to:

You can use these hints in conjunction with your manual check to verify the mobile-friendliness of your website.

The Code Coverage report is an optional feature of the Performance report, designed to help technical SEOs identify potentially wasted code. Particularly, instances where CSS and JavaScript code files are loaded but not used for rendering, whether totally or partially.

This is likely not a check that you need or want to carry out every time you analyse performance, but a useful data point when needed nevertheless.

You can enable Code Coverage under the Performance & Mobile Friendly Advanced Settings:

Within the Code Coverage report, you’ll find two tabs, each aggregating site-wide coverage data for each CSS and JS file found on your website, with a margin of wasted code.

From here, Sitebulb allows you to analyse individual files and find all incoming references to each file.

For more on using and understanding the Code Coverage report, check out our dedicated documentation.

This Article works in conjunction with Sitebulb's Technical SEO Auditing template. For more in-depth guidance on auditing performance with Sitebulb, check out the Performance Report documentation, which also touches on Performance Budgets settings and data.

Continue your technical SEO auditing journey by following the step-by-step articles below.

Watch the recording for the latest Sitebulb training session on auditing performance.