Why Use DebugBear?

Wondering what makes DebugBear a great tool to speed up your website, and how it's different from other tools?

This article explains what makes DebugBear different.

Built for Core Web Vitals

Google's Core Web Vitals measure how fast your website is and whether it provides a good experience to users.

If you have good Web Vitals you'll rank better in Google and have happier users.

DebugBear is a modern tool that's built with the Core Web Vitals in mind:

• We provide in-depth debug data to optimize Core Web Vitals
• We monitor Core Web Vitals in the lab as well as for real users
• We consider the needs of everyone involved in Core Web Vitals optimization: from clients to Technical SEOs and developers

Site speed data you can trust

Collecting accurate site speed data isn't easy. Many tools use shortcuts to avoid the cost of setting up a high-quality test environment.

• PageSpeed Insights uses simulated throttling that isn't reliable
• DevTools also doesn't accurately reflect a real network connection
• Other tools, like Pingdom or Datadog, run tests directly on a fast data center network connection

DebugBear runs tests in a controlled lab environment that reflects the experience of real users.

Compare that with this test result from PageSpeed Insights (actual measured data surfaced by our Site Speed Chrome extension). The Largest and First Contentful Paint events happen at the same time, but PSI says the LCP happens much later.

Sometimes PageSpeed Insights even reports that the website would load faster on a slower connection!

Even other paid site speed tools often only report low quality data. This also applies to SEO tools like Moz.

Detailed test reports

A lot of stuff happens when loading a website, and it's often hard to find out what's really slowing it down.

DebugBear provides a tailored report for every performance metric that surfaces only the relevant data. That includes a detailed request waterfall that shows more than just a list of requests:

• See how the priority of each request and bandwidth is used to download the response
• Quickly identify render-blocking requests or preloaded resources or the LCP image

Finally, all this data is put into context by showing the rendering progress at each point in time as well as CPU activity for each resource.

Easily compare test results

Tracking down the cause of a site speed regression can be hard. DebugBear lets you see test results side by side and highlights differences.

This also works for optimizations.

In the example above two changes were made to load the LCP element more quickly. Accordingly, the Largest Contentful Paint chart shows a large reduction in page load time.

You can also show off optimizations to clients or team members by viewing a before and after video recording.

Configurability and advanced settings

While being easy to set up, DebugBear also supports many advanced features:

• Over 20 global test locations
• Set up custom test devices
• Test pages that require login or Basic Authentication
• Handle age gates or consent banners

Can we build this in-house?

Building a Lighthouse monitoring system in-house generally isn't a good idea:

1. You'll get unreliable simulated metrics from Lighthouse
2. Custom systems are difficult to maintain over time and you'll need to divert engineering time away from other projects

What our customers say

We have over 200 happy customers. Here's what some of them have said about us:

DebugBear has been a game changer in how we monitor and improve page speed for our clients. It's the perfect workflow to monitor and fix page speed issues before they start impacting Google rankings.

Steve Walker, Technology Director at Journey Further

We've updated around 15,000 pages and saw some nice gains from it. "Good URLs" and their impressions have increased 3x since implementation.

Rafayel Begoyan, Senior SEO Specialist at CoinStats

We love DebugBear. It has proven useful time and time again. I evaluated the different competitors and DebugBear was the best overall product.

Rafael Corral, Senior Software Engineer at Medium

The reporting data is very helpful in pinpointing what causes site speed issues – immediately actionable. It's well above and beyond the info you get from Lighthouse and the performance tests through Chrome.

Loren McDonald, IT Director at Manncorp

DebugBear's dashboard lets us see Core Web Vitals at a glance. At the same time, we're able to examine each result in a developer-friendly way.

John Bacon, Product Manager at GigSalad

Try DebugBear for free

Start monitoring your website with a free 14-day trial, or run a free site speed test here.