DareBoost is an auditing software specialising in giving you insight into the performance of your website, it is a web-based application that continuously analyses your site. 
When it comes to SEO, the performance of a website can be the difference between ranking at the top position and falling way below. This tool is useful for anyone in the digital marketing industry managing a list of websites or who just want to rank their own. This tool checks all of speed-related factors along with other aspects that you'd expect to find on other auditing tools on the market.
Before I get into the nitty-gritty of what DareBoost can do, let's talk about the costs involved.
Pricing
Before paying a single penny, you can create a free account with DareBoost that gives you 5 websites to analyse. This allows you to get to know the tool before making any sort of purchase. So now onto what the paid version does for you. While you might find that all of the main stats to your website are completely perfect in that scenario. While you can't keep pushing the limits it might still make sense in future.
There are various different packages you can choose from, depending on how often and how many people are going to use it I would suggest choosing a package best for you. The cheapest starts you off at $25 which includes 50 searches a month and 1 page that you can monitor daily and receive email reports on. On the higher end of the scale is the "Enterprise" option which has unlimited analyses searches and up to 10 pages that are monitored on an hourly basis. If none of these options appeals to you then There is also a custom option available where you can set which features you have for a bespoke price.
If you are a massive business that is going to require lots of different users then you will need to go for a higher price range but if you're just buying this tool for yourself then the "freelance" edition will do just fine.
Now that parts out of the way we can move onto the features of this tool.
Analyse a Website
The first thing I'll say about this tool is how simple and easy the interface is to use. The nice design and panel along left-hand side creates an easy way to navigate your way around the tool.
Dareboost lets you analyse any site you want and you can do it in a few different ways. As you can see from the top, you can select which version of the site you load being either desktop or mobile, which browser you use and which location the user is in when loading up the website.
You can get even more in depth and look at some of the advanced settings just below the search bar:
- Bandwidth - Which kind of internet connection you are pulling the same from such as 3G or fibre optics.
- Htaccess - If you have a page that has basic authentication then you can enter the username and password require so Dareboost can log in and analyse it. (You'll be best creating a test user as DareBoost stores the information on their database.
- Data Form - DareBoost can analyse a page after a form has been filled out. You can enter
- HTTP Headers - You can add multiple HTTP headers to request from allowing you to essentially act as different bots.
- Blacklist - You can blacklist certain pages from being crawled here by sticking them here.
- DNS Mapping - This allows you to direct the DareBoost bot to another domain after landing on the original
- Animations - You can disable some features on the website that may affect the metrics such as slider animations or custom CSS features.
Results
The search will only take a couple of seconds and up comes your page results.
As you can see, you are first presented with some interesting metrics. You are given an overall website score shown on the top left-hand side, followed by 3 sections split into issues, improvements and successes. I'll go further into those sections in a little bit but first, let's talk about the stats just below.
Dareboost is all about your website's performance. It will determine how fast your site loads from the millisecond its request hits the server to when the page has been fully loaded on the browser. The 3 orange metrics are the different stages involved in loading up a website for the user. This kind of insight lets you really narrow down which part of the process is running slow.
For example, if your site begins to render extremely quickly but takes a long time to fully load, it means that there will be some sort of problem with the amount of content on the page whether it be too high-resolution images or some javascript that is causing a heavy impact. Likewise, if the first byte takes a while to load then something is wrong on the server side causing a longer response time.
You can go even further into the analysis by clicking on the "More metrics" button.
This will show you a breakdown of every process involved in loading a website from start to finish. Now you most likely won't need to know all of this information but again it's pretty handy to see every aspect so that if something does go wrong, you'll know exactly where it is.
On the left is the stats in blue which is the amount of requests required to load the page and the how much data was loaded(weight). The graph is split up nicely into 5 separate categories.
- HTML
- CSS
- Scripts
- Images
- Others
You can expand on these categories also by clicking on the "Timelines & Waterfalls" button.
This shows you every file that has been loaded on the page. It tells you how much space each file takes up and their individual loading times.
Things To Improve
If you remember at the top of the analysis there was the issues, improvements and successes. At the bottom is the big list of all of the things on your site that you should be looking to fix.
In the picture above you can see there are a few issues with my site such as the favicon image is quite large. DareBoost doesn't just show you what problems your website has but also tells you how to fix it. Each issue will have a little arrow underneath that will expand on the issue, giving you a little insight into how it was caused as well.
So say we take the issue I just mentioned with the favicon image. Clicking on the arrow has opened up a little bit of information, telling me what the recommended size is and what the size is currently.
I can now go and quickly fix this issue and when running the analysis again, it'll be gone from the list and boost my overall score at the top.
Monitoring
DareBoost also has a monitoring feature that can alert you if issues occur on the site. Having this set up means you can leave this tool running in the background and when anything goes wrong, you'll receive an email about it.
To monitor a page, all you do is add the URL and choose the frequency of the scans. Dareboost can run a scan on your site on a daily or monthly basis. If you choose daily then you can choose what time of the day that the scan runs.
On top of this, you can receive a weekly digest which is just a summary of your page's performance throughout the week. After a couple of weeks, you'll be able to see if there is any kind of improvements that have been made or if anything is on the decline.
To Sum Up
The process of using DareBoost is pretty straightforward. With no sign up required for the free version, you can start running searches instantly from the homepage. DareBoost is one of the best places to go for analysing your website's performance. You'll be hard-pressed to find a better breakdown of website speed anywhere else on the market which is why I highly suggest you give this tool a try. If you then decide that it's something for you, it's flexible pricing scheme means you can get started no matter the budget that you're working with.