Frequently asked questions

Sitebulb is an award-winning website audit tool for SEOs, available as desktop software and also now as a cloud tool accessible via your web browser.

Sitebulb is for all SEOs. Whether you're doing freelance, in-house, or agency SEO, there's a version of Sitebulb to suit. As your career progresses and you work with larger, more complex websites, Sitebulb's website audit software can scale with you.

If you're a small to medium sized business owner or SEO, Sitebulb Lite is our most affordable desktop plan and will more than cover the technical SEO basics.

If you're a consultant, in-house or agency SEO, Sitebulb Pro is our most popular plan and the ideal website audit tool for you.

If you're auditing enormous websites or you’re part of a large SEO team, Sitebulb Cloud is the most suitable option, as it has all the features of our award-winning desktop product without any of the limitations.

Sitebulb makes website audits easier, more efficient, more accurate, and more affordable for SEOs:

• Easier because of our helpful Hints and Hint explanations, which can be copy-pasted directly into client reports.
• More efficient because of our clear issue prioritization system.
• More accurate because we show you website data exactly as Google sees it, even after JavaScript rendering.
• More affordable because our Sitebulb Cloud customers pay a fraction of the price of other cloud crawlers.

All this means that SEOs can have more confidence in their recommendations and deliver more value.

You can find out how much our different plans cost on our pricing page.

The big difference is that with Lite, you are restricted to crawling 10,000 URLs in total.

There are also a number of features and reports that are only available with a Pro license:

• Performance & Mobile Friendly
• Structured Data
• International & Hreflang
• Spell Checker
• Accessibility
• AMP
• Scheduling
• Auto-export to Google Sheets

There are also some limitations to crawl speed and the number of content extraction options you can add.

The main differences between Sitebulb Desktop and Sitebulb Cloud are:

Sitebulb Desktop is a phenomenal product, and Sitebulb Cloud is the next logical iteration, making it available in the browser and moving away from a dependence on your desktop machine.

Most Sitebulb Cloud customers prefer it to Desktop either because they want to crawl at scale, or they want to get their entire team working from the same crawl data. Others simply prefer that it is cloud based, with no reliance on their local desktop computer.

It's much more expensive than Desktop, with plans starting from £195/month, but it’s a lot less expensive than other cloud crawlers on the market.

If you'd like to explore it further, our Sitebulb Cloud page will help you understand how it works a bit better, and our Sitebulb Cloud pricing page will give you a better idea of how much it might cost you.

Our most popular plan by a long way is Sitebulb Pro, as it offers an award-winning feature set at a really affordable price point. It is perfect for SEO professionals, consultants and digital marketing agencies.

Sitebulb Lite is designed for users who don't really need to do website audits quite as often, or for users who aren't necessarily SEO professionals. As such it is an ideal fit for freelancers, startups, website owners, and web agencies.

Sitebulb Cloud is ideal for SEOs that want to crawl at scale (hundreds of thousands of URLs or more), or they want to get their entire team working from the same crawl data.

There's no need for a demo of Sitebulb Desktop because you can test drive it yourself for two weeks for free. Head to the Sitebulb download page to get started.

If you'd like a demo of Sitebulb Cloud, contact [email protected] and book a call in with our team.

Yes, you can take Sitebulb for a spin to get a feel for how it works. The trial is equivalent to Sitebulb Pro (desktop), and it is completely free – no credit card and no up-front commitment. Head to the Sitebulb download page to get started.

Sitebulb Pro is desktop software that runs on Windows or Mac, so the scale or website that you can crawl can be limited by the specification of your laptop/desktop machine. Most normal work computers can handle websites up to 500,000 URLs, so that is the default limit set. However you can raise the crawl limit up to 2 million URLs - please just be aware that you may be stretching your computer beyond its capability. Please read our documentation before attempting to do this: How to configure your machine for crawling large websites

Simply log into Sitebulb and hit the green button to start a new project, then follow the on-screen instructions to select the data you want Sitebulb to collect, and hit start!

This question is impossible to answer without the classic SEO, “it depends” (sorry!).

But it is true! Crawl speed is determined by:

• The amount of resources available on your machine (processors are the most important resource here)
• Whether you are crawling with the HTML Crawler (faster) or the Chrome Crawler (slower)
• Which audit settings you switch on (some are slower than others – in particular Performance, Accessibility and Spell Checker)
• How fast the website server responds and how fast you are allowed to crawl (some servers restrict requests)

In reality, Sitebulb’s default speed settings of 5 URLs/second are more than adequate for most websites and most users, but you can easily adjust the speed settings if you wish to experiment.

At the top end, Sitebulb Cloud can crawl over 300 URLs/second(!).

Yes. You can easily integrate Google Analytics (either GA4 or Universal) in order to extract visitor data.

You can also integrate Google Search Console to extract;

• Impressions, clicks, CTR, average position
• Keyword data in bulk
• Indexability data via the URL Inspection API

Yes, Sitebulb can validate structured data against both Schema.org and Google’s Search Feature guidelines (for rich results). It produces a unique report that aggregates issues, making it incredibly easy to isolate template-based problems and effectively communicate these to clients or developers.

Of course. Sitebulb provides many different methods of URL exclusion, most of which you may be familiar with from other crawling tools.

We have a documentation section on URL Exclusions, which covers how to:

• Exclude paths or URL patterns
• Include paths or URL patterns (i.e. exclude everything BUT the path you want)
• Exclude URLs that contain parameters
• Rewrite URLs to strip parameters
• Block third-party URLs

Yes, you can build your own Looker Studio dashboards or reports using Sitebulb audit data by one of two methods;

• Via a Google Sheet (both Desktop and Cloud)
• Via our Looker Studio Connector (Cloud only)

Sitebulb doesn’t yet do log file analysis – but this is in the build pipeline and will be available soon!

No, JavaScript crawling is included in all Sitebulb plans.

There’s currently no way to do this easily, however we’re working on it!

Yes, absolutely – and at no extra cost. Each Sitebulb Cloud plan comes with a set number of users - for example ‘Small’ is for 2 users - so you also get 2 Sitebulb Pro licenses for desktop.

This means that you actually get a hybrid, access to both a desktop crawler and a cloud crawler. You are also able to connect to your cloud server through the desktop interface, and easily switch between your desktop version and the cloud server. 

Not yet, no. You are able to extract aggregated data via webhooks or through our Looker Studio Connector, which enables you to easily build out your own internal or customer-facing dashboards.

However, currently there is no way to extract row level data via anything other than spreadsheet export - although we plan to add this functionality to Sitebulb Cloud during 2024. There is also no way currently to start or stop audits without interacting with Sitebulb’s user interface.

It can take up to 24 hours for us to set up your cloud server, and once it is ready you will be emailed login instructions. Your cloud server will live on a URL like https://yoursite.sitebulb.cloud and you will need to login using your Sitebulb account, and from there you can invite your team mates.

We do not offer free trials for Sitebulb Cloud. However, you can kick the tires of Sitebulb for free by signing up for a free trial of the desktop version. Sitebulb Desktop is almost identical to Cloud in terms of features – it just does not enable crawling at scale so easily, and does not have the team/collaboration element (as your crawl data lives on your local machine). If you’d like to see a live demonstration of Sitebulb Cloud in action, please contact [email protected].

You can pay for Sitebulb via credit card or PayPal. If you wish to pay by purchase order/invoice, we can offer this for yearly plans only - please contact us on [email protected] for details.

You can cancel your subscription very easily by logging into our Sitebulb Customer Portal. If you are unsure how to do this, please follow these instructions: How to cancel your Sitebulb subscription

If your subscription has multiple user licenses and you wish to remove some, you can do this by logging into the Sitebulb Customer Portal and revoking/removing licenses: How to remove user licenses

If you have cancelled your Sitebulb subscription and wish to re-activate it, please go through the purchase process again on Sitebulb’s pricing page.

Previous audit data will still be accessible within Sitebulb once you log back into the software, for all desktop plans (however, previous audit data cannot be recovered for Sitebulb Cloud).

If you wish to upgrade from Sitebulb Lite to Sitebulb Pro, please message us on [email protected] and we will be happy to assist.

If you wish to upgrade from Sitebulb Pro to Sitebulb Cloud, the easiest thing to do is sign up for Sitebulb Cloud via the cloud pricing page. If you then message us on [email protected] we can cancel your Sitebulb Pro subscription and issue a pro-rata refund for any overlap.

If your subscription has multiple user licenses and you wish to remove some, you can do this by logging into the Sitebulb Customer Portal and revoking/removing licenses: How to remove user licenses

If you wish to downgrade from Sitebulb Pro to Sitebulb Lite, please message us on [email protected] and we will be happy to assist.