Product

Intro

The idea is to build a monitoring tool that will fetch the most important miss-functionalities of a website in the best possible timing and notify website owner/developer about the problem, as well as to provide the clear information how to resolve it.

I believe this can be done in a simple and clever way at the same time.

Why

I maintain a couple of websites and also was involved in “professional configuration” offer from WP Rocket, where we would install and configure WP Rocket for a specific fee.

It happened many times that customers come back to me/us saying something was wrong, whether immediately or after some time.

Although I was checking as many pages and elements as possible, it was not easy to check everything. That’s how the idea came to my mind.

The final concept is to gather as much information as possible from a website, analyze it, and decide if it’s necessary to notify the user.

If so, the tool would provide the information about the problem as well as the clear path on how to resolve it.

Features

Validator is basically a crawler (Chrome simulator) that is checking the site and collecting information from the source code, Console, Lighthouse (Google PageSpeed Insights), headers information and so on.

There are a couple of features I have in mind, some of them would be published in the very first version of the tool, some would go later, so having the clear roadmap and collecting feedback would be one of the activities to have after the release.

Features:

  • It’s very important to say that Validator will check as many pages as possible, not only the Homepage. Some sites will have a lot of pages, so it’s important to find a clever way to cover all post types and add priority to the most important pages
  • Uptime monitoring
  • Console check for JS errors and other potentially important messages (this would cover 404 errors for missing assets)
  • LightHouse report
  • ——- Speed (e.g. notify user if score goes down 80% and provide a clear instructions about what went wrong)
  • ——- SEO
  • ——- Accessibility
  • ——- Best practices
  • Visual Regression (taking screenshots and comparing it with staging/not-cached/previous screenshot, trying to fetch differences caused by website missfunction and not by content change, for example
  • Custom rules set by user. For example:
  • —-— Check if the source code contains specific words in order to determine if the Used CSS (by WP Rocket in this case) is generated. If not, send me a message via Slack. Or
  • —-— Try to purchase a product every day at 6PM and let me know if you notice any errors during the process

Use Cases

I will record a couple of videos in the upcoming days.

WP Plugin

As I mentioned, websites might have a lot of pages and it might be hard to fetch them all and see when changes are made. That’s why the WP plugin would be a great solution.

With it, we could fetch all information from site, what post types it has, when the change is made, new post is created.

For example, instead of checking all pages/posts (of the same post type/page template…), we can test 3-4 of them, no error is found, let’s test a few more until we are sure there is no issue.

We can control things better, and even do some processes from the users server (sending a request to PageSpeed Insights/LightHouse.

The plugin would be connected to the API and fetching information from our server.

The Company

About the Company itself, from the technical perspective, I already have a registered D.O.O. and it would be used for the process

About the company vision, my goal is not to build a big companycorporation. I’d rather stick to the small team that does the great job and sets standards in the industry (not mandatory, but it would be great to set the initiative and work on solutions for new or old unresolved problems)

We would be a bootstrapped company, so we would not consider any investments.

I’d like/prefer to operate transparently and share our journey on a regular basis with public (on social media, our blog…)

Something to consider, every employee would have a specific share of the company

We would share the specific % of the profit with employees each year

All these things are something to talk about and consider if you decide to join.

Competition

DebugBear is probably the main competitor on the market, that does basically the same thing as I plan. I still think we can do this better/more intuitive and probably for less money then them.

They focus on PageSpeed Insight metrics.

Users Personas

Agencies – those maintaining 20+ websites. I talked with couple of owners and they liked idea, telling me they would be willing to give it a try. Probably the most famous is WPBuffs.

Developers – I believe this would be a great tool to avoid their clients contact them because something is wrong, they will be aware whenever something goes wrong.

Individuals – non tech-savvy people/website owners, who are not sure how to fix problems. We are here to give them as precise information as possible about how to solve the problem

Next Steps

Once I finish a few more technical tasks, planning to start the Early Beta Testers group of around 20 people who would provide feedback about the tool (I plan to create a short form with questions, plus allow them to provide a direct written feedback). Since I know these people in person, hearing from them in person would be a great benefit 🙂

Once we receive the feedback, we can open the waiting list (landing page) and ideally launch by the June 1st. We would be fully available during WordCamp Europe and that would be a great opportunity to promote the tool and talk to people. We would probably be in the Public Beta at that moment.