
Show HN: All You Can Optimize on Your Website in a Single Report - damienj
https://www.dareboost.com
======
web007
Feedback for @damienj: * Your Terms & Conditions link is a PDF that downloads
vs displays inline. That's super weird, and I thought I got a report without
signing up. Nope, it's your ToS.

* The paginated loading of HTML/CSS validation does strange things with the loading bar. I was trying to drag it to the bottom, and it kept moving itself upward as it loaded new pieces. Doing the deferred loading is cool, but it would be better to kick it off async and have it run to completion, versus waiting for scroll-per-page.

* In the downloaded report, there's no indication of what the grey circles are (average top-1000 result).

* Detected Technologies is odd, it only lists comScore for the site I tested - should that include Google Analytics, Facebook Graph, etc.?

* The Table of Contents isn't clickable to get to the related sections.

* The color-coding of sections doesn't mesh mentally with the counts presented. I have something in green (Success) with 7 tips, and something else in red (Issues) with 7 tips as well. Is that good or bad?

* I didn't check the "short" report option, but I'd like to see just things-to-fix in its own report, with details of how to fix them. As-is I have a 35-page report with no clear indication of what the biggest problems are, just the biggest per-category. I realize the webpage already does that, but unless I'm the sole developer I would want to send a hit list out to my team as a PDF.

* Your own page is only 99 out of 100 =)

All of that aside, this looks really useful. It's like a prettier version of
[http://www.webpagetest.org/](http://www.webpagetest.org/) \- a lot of the
same info, but a much better / more modern presentation. A good pricing hook
might be a free (scheduled) report once a month, with the top-level warnings
included but a paid option for the full detail.

Good luck, and congrats on "SHIP IT"!

~~~
damienj
Thanks _a lot_ for this great piece of feedback.

\- T&C : that was a fast fix for something, it will be solve as soon as we
find a few minutes

\- lazyloading on W3C listings: agreed and noted

\- PDF/average top-1000 result : indeed, we have to add that!

\- Detected Technologies: Yes for Google Analytics, that's odd. No for social
widgets. We are mainly focused on CMS and frameworks.

\- Table of Contents: you're right

\- color-coding: it will be changed soon. New policy will be: if you have one
issue at least in a given category, the category will be red (for now is based
on the average grade of the category).

\- "short" report: you're not alone, we add you to the list, but still to few
people

\- 99/100 damned!

"A good pricing hook might be a free (scheduled) report once a month"

> you have that daily for free (from you're dashboard, you can create a
> "monitoring"). Paid options allow to use the tool on other pages than
> homepages and to use advanced settings (custom bandwidth, authentication,
> etc)

Thanks again! (and sorry for typos)

------
theandrewbailey
This would be great if you didn't need to register to get advice from tests.
There's no obvious reason to require it (your website says it's free, after
all). There are several other test sites that do not need registration to do
so.

~~~
chillingeffect
However, I did like that it unlocked the page without having to reload when I
registered! Nice touch!

a few small spelling mistakes: En savoir plus. (is that being cute, or just
not xlated yet?) This page do not provide information to social networks.

Still overall I am quite pleased with the report quality! And I like that it
tells how to fix things like https, Open Graph, etc.

I am curious why my images load slowly though! It takes four of my images
(png/jpg) from 1.56 to 1.95 seconds to load. They are 13kB to 32kB. One is
111kB. Any ideas? Is that just the server's fault (hostmonster)? Would it be
worth it to host the images elsewhere?

~~~
damienj
Single Page Applications are great ;)

spelling mistakes > thanks a lot, it has been fixed! (correct answer was :
"not xlated yet"!)

Thanks for this positive feedback too. About your issue with your images, have
you test your website from the nearest test location from your hosting
provider? (latency can hurt)

------
Karunamon
This seems very similar to Google's Pagespeed [1], but after registering and
diving in a bit, I see some very useful extra features.. recurring monitoring
for one, cache/connection simulation, and some other niceties that GPS doesn't
give you.

Very nice!

FWIW, I don't share the hatred of registration that the others here do. I
don't think it's asking a lot for an email address and a password after you
perform a useful service for someone.

[1]:
[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/)

~~~
damienj
yeah we indeed share some checkpoints with GPS (because we're using it, and
YSlow too)

Thanks for this great feedback, and thanks for your point of view about
registration, that's very valuable for us to have both sides, that's a
difficult choice (anyway, inorder to offer the free monitoring,we need an
email address!)

~~~
jknz
You force me to register to see the blurred text.

Ok let's take some time to create a temporary email address because, well,
your product looks refreshing.

I put down the email address (the one I just spent time creating!) and a
password. Your now reject my temporary email address as being temporary !

If I eventually give up, and give you my real email address, will you send my
_any_ email ? That one would be unsollicited, and you can be sure that people
who created a temporary email address will mark your emails as spam, which may
destroy your sender reputation...

People who give their real email address may not mark your emails as spam. But
people who take the time to create a temporary email address will, with very
high probability.

~~~
damienj
The email address will be used if you create a _free_ monitoring, to send you
weekly digests and alerts in case of quality issue / slowdown on your
monitored page. So yes, we reject temporary address as we don't want to
analyze daily your webpage if you're not reading our e-mails.

~~~
jknz
What if I just want to see the blurred text?

~~~
Karunamon
Then just freakin' sign up already! With the amount of time you've spent
typing these screeds, you could have registered, decided you didn't like it,
and killed your account about 10 times over.

This is not helpful criticism in the least - most people don't object to
sharing something as innocuous as an email considering they just did something
nice for you.

------
sergiotapia
It's asking me to sign up to read the suggestions, Quora-style. Yucky yucky.
Consider removing that please.

~~~
damienj
please read last comment!

We're not really Quora-sized (4 founders - 25yo).

------
wila
Cool.

There's never enough of these type of tools.

An alternative of this site which I have used in the past is:
[http://www.webpagetest.org/](http://www.webpagetest.org/)

~~~
damienj
Thanks! WPT is great and we love it, but we would want to go further (with
quality checkpoints, not only performance ones) and with a easy-to-use GUI
(lots of our users are not very technical people)

------
guidedlight
Great start. I work a lot with web performance monitoring tools. This is
definitely a fresh approach.

I would definitely build out features/checks that other tools aren't doing at
the lower price-point. For example:

* Geo-location speed comparisons (e.g. performance from New York -vs- Sydney). You seem to be halfway there, just need to add the comparison graphs.

* Bandwidth speed comparisons (e.g. 4G connection -vs- 100Mb Fibre). Most people don't test their websites on slow connections.

Well Done. Ping me if you want some assistance.

~~~
damienj
Thanks! comparisons are indeed part of our roadmap, we have some mockups, but
nothing we are really proud of for now! I would be glad to have more of your
feedback, thanks!

------
JungleGymSam
> DAREBOOST may use the User’s trademarks and logos for commercial purposes on
> any document or in any medium throughout the term of the Contract.

Why not just politely ask a business for their permission when you want to use
their logos rather than requiring it in your ToS?

I'm disappointed because this looks _really_ nice and we're just getting
starting on a new revision of our site.

~~~
damienj
I understand what you're saying. I take full responsability of the
inconvenience - as I'm the one that have added this line :)

If you don't want us to do so, just drop us en e-mail, and we will not and
never do so.

About the background of this line: "politely ask a business" > unfortunatelly,
it takes time, we are 4 young guys and are dealing with bigger companies. We
were facing issues to get answers, we were losing time, and for the one and
single goal to add a logo on our homepage and to help us to make a living from
this startup...

If you want to be more confident about us:
[https://www.dareboost.com/en/about-us](https://www.dareboost.com/en/about-us)

~~~
JungleGymSam
Thanks for sharing your reasoning but you're asking for far more than a logo
on the homepage. Perhaps you could add a checkbox at signup that says
something like, "Will you allow us to use your company name and/or logo on our
homepage?"

That will give you a good idea of how your customers feel about this. It's
probable that many people are signing up for your service and are not
authorized to give you permission in the first place.

Good luck to you and your team. I'll think about sending in the email you
mentioned.

~~~
damienj
Thanks for your answer. That would be an idea, but it's still an additional
checkbox and we like to keep it simple, because asking thousands of users just
to use 10 or 15 logos does not really worth it.

But I agree that theoretically T&C allow us to do more than using logos on our
own website, I'll try to find a way to add a restriction on what we can do
without explicit consent.

Thanks! (my nickname is simply 'damien' in my pro email address if you want to
send me directly the mentioned email)

------
dflock
Seems really nice - signed up.

But - you really, really need a native english copywriter to go through all of
your english text. It's full of small mistakes which detract from an otherwise
good first impression.

~~~
damienj
Thanks for the advice. We look forward finding someone able to help us to grow
the business (we're all engineers...) and to be native english, and still be
able to speak a technical english. Not easy, but we will as soon as possible!

------
expando
There are a couple misspellings that I've noticed, plus some awkward phrasing.
Maybe get someone else to look over the copy on your site? This looks really
helpful otherwise.

~~~
damienj
Sorry for that. We're some french guys and we try to do our best, but for now
we did not have the chance to hire someone to correct that. There's a "red
thumb" on the left of each tip, you can warn us about misspellings with it, it
will be widely appreciated :)

------
fiatjaf
These automated tools are always cool, but from where did you take that we
should "Define at least <h1> and <h2> titles in your content"?

~~~
damienj
SEO purpose, semantic way to define important content

~~~
theandrewbailey
Heading tags also have extreme usability and accessibility features. Screen
readers love using them to jump around pages.

~~~
damienj
You're totally right! Thanks for the update.

------
acconrad
It's kind of annoying and hypocritical when you give my website the
accessibility suggestion that you shouldn't use target="_blank" when the page
I am on is riddled with links opening in new tabs. I dunno I don't see that as
getting a 0/100 for having 20 when your results page has 56 of them.

~~~
damienj
This suggestion only apply when using mobile testing with our tool. We do not
penalize target="_blank" on desktop websites.

And unfortunately, for now, our service still needs big updates for mobile UX,
but most of our users only use us on desktop.

------
bigethan
I would appreciate the ability to add a custom user agent to the request so
that this could run on sites that detect a mobile user agent and change
accordingly.

This is good stuff. Great performance checklist.

~~~
damienj
From our homepage, under the URL field, you can select a mobile device (Nexus)
rather than Firefox.

With a paid account, you can customize any HTTP Header (and more)

------
damienj
Hey guys! you're a lot from the U.S., feel free to test your website from our
New York test location !

------
angkec
Just curious, what is the technology used to control browsers programmatically
to carry out such tests?

~~~
damienj
We use Selenium and some proxies to collect data

~~~
angkec
Thanks!

------
DAddYE
Congrats guys!

Just a quick suggestion, try to do something server side instead to use
`.blur` css class.

~~~
damienj
Thanks! We know, that's currently not an issue for us if you want to bypass
it, as the advice are available after free registration!

------
benaiah
FYI: your text blurring on the signed-out analysis page can be defeated by
some very simple twiddling with the page source. You may want to render the
blurred text to PNGs or something instead of trying to hide it with CSS.

~~~
damienj
yes we know thanks. Not an issue for us as registering is free. The idea is
just to get you to create an account and to try our monitoring feature!

