Every so often, users experience issues with Sitebulb Desktop that means they are unable to use the software effectively.

The ridiculous thing is that the classic 'turn it off, turn it back on' method will solve a lot of problems.

If you are struggling with Sitebulb, our best advice is to simply restart your computer and then try it again. I know this sounds like the same old shit advice you get from internet service providers, but it is actually a good thing to try in this case. 60% of the time, it works every time.

If rebooting your machine did not work, move onto troubleshooting the most common cases for Sitebulb Failure.

The more you understand about how Sitebulb works, the more effective you will be when using it, and the quicker you will be able to self-diagnose problems and potentially fix them yourself. See: 'Close down all those 400 Chrome tabs which are using up all your RAM.'

Sitebulb is desktop software, so it needs to use the computer resources on your machine. If you push it really hard (e.g. increase the speed really high), you can run out of resources (CPU/RAM) and it can crash your machine.

You can diagnose this by opening Task Manager and having a look at what you CPU and memory usage is looking like. Is it close to capacity? Is Sitebulb using up an unsustainable amount of resources? Are there other resource-intensive apps holding on to the resources that Sitebulb needs? Are you running simultaneous audits with a different crawler? 👀

Again, restarting your computer may do wonders here, as it will close down all of those abandoned tabs and the background applications holding on to your CPU and memory for dear life and free up space for Sitebulb to run.

On the other hand, if Sitebulb is using up your CPU and RAM, it may also be a good idea to pause any running audit and restart your machine to reset things.

Before restarting your crawl, consider adjusting your settings to ensure that you are only collecting the data you need and crawling within the limits of what your computer can handle.

Sitebulb relies on a stable internet connection, it needs to make outgoing connections to websites in order to crawl the URLs and collect data. If your internet connection keeps dropping out, this will cause problems with using the software.

Find a stable internet connection or connect through an Ethernet cable and try again.

In our time supporting Sitebulb users we have seen all sorts of weird and wonderful websites. Sometimes, they will be doing something that causes Sitebulb problems when it tries to crawl (e.g. a rogue script).

Antivirus does not give a shit about your SEO audit - Sitebulb utilises headless Chromium in order to render websites (same as Googlebot!). Some anti-virus software will see headless Chromium being used by an application on your computer and think it is some sort of malware or trojan, then either delete or block Chromium. This will stop you from being able to use the Chrome Crawler.

If you ever have a problem using Sitebulb and you are unable to resolve it yourself, please tell us! We will almost always be able to help, so you can get back to using the software effectively.

The best place to report problems is through the messenger within the software.

If you can't open Sitebulb at all, you can also reach us through our support email address: [email protected].