Video Guidance
Watch the latest training session recording on getting started with Sitebulb:
Understanding Projects & Audits
When you first log in to Sitebulb, you’ll land on your Project dashboard. Here, you’ll find a list of all your existing projects.
New Projects
When you start a new project, you get to determine your project settings; every audit run within the project will follow the same settings.
There are no limits on how many Projects you can create on any Sitebulb plan.
Audits
An audit is the result of a single crawl. After the crawl is complete, Sitebulb transforms the raw crawl data into structured insights in the form of an Audit.
There are no limits on how many Audits you can run on any Sitebulb plan.
Creating and Maintaining Projects
Maintaining consistent settings within a Project allows you to run regular audits, benchmark and accurately compare audits over time. Project settings can be updated as needed.
Tips:
Give each new project a descriptive name so you can easily identify its purpose later.
Create separate Projects for different auditing purposes (e.g. different areas of the website, or different auditing goals, like running a Performance audit of key pages).
Running your first Audit
To create a project and run your first audit, use the green Start a new Project button at the top right of your screen.
On the New Project screen, give your Project a clear and descriptive name, then add your Start URL. Typically, this will be your homepage, but you can also begin your crawl from a specific folder or directory if needed.
Tips:
Give your Project a clear and descriptive name
Your Start URL must return a 200 Success code; if that is not the case, Sitebulb will flag this up for you. See this article for how to fix errors with your start URL.
Choosing Audit Settings
Once you click Save and Continue on the New Project screen, you will move on to the Audit Settings screen. Here, you get to choose how Sitebulb crawls and what is included in your finalised Audit.
Audit settings define what data your crawl collects and directly affect crawl speed and system resource use.
Read our article on Choosing the right settings for efficient auditing for more granular guidance.
Tips:
Enable only the reports you need - this will make your crawls faster and simplify the data in your finalised Audit.
Choose the correct crawler. The HTML crawler uses ‘traditional’ HTML extraction. The Chrome crawler renders JavaScript.
Crawling a large website for the first time? Run a Sample Audit first. Read this article for more on how to crawl large websites.
Don’t overthink your first audit - running with default settings will give you plenty of information to get started, and you can always adjust and re-audit later on.
Start Your First Crawl
Once your settings are in place, hit Start Audit and watch the Sitebulb magic happen on the Progress screen.
If crawling on Sitebulb Desktop, remember that your machine needs to be on and the Sitebulb application needs to be open to crawl.
Crawling on Sitebulb Cloud? Feel free to shut down your machine and make a cuppa, your Audit will be ready for you in your workspace when you're back.
Navigating Audit Results
When the audit finishes, you’ll land on the Audit Overview tab. From here, you can navigate to different areas of the Audit to find key data points.
Read our Article on Navigating Sitebulb Audits to understand the different parts of your Sitebulb Audit and how to efficiently find key data points and insights.
Learn More
Explore other articles in the Sitebulb Help Centre for in-depth documentation and tutorials.
Join upcoming live training sessions.