How Journey Further uses DebugBear to speed up their client websites
Steve Walker is the Technology Director at performance marketing agency Journey Further. In this case study, he talks about how they use DebugBear to track performance and get client buy-in for site speed work.
What problem were you trying to solve?
Primarily we needed to pass Core Web Vitals for the SEO benefit.
What you did do before DebugBear?
We carried out audits and provided site speed recommendations but sometimes struggled to get buy-in from clients as we didn’t have a way of tracking performance uplift over time, or testing the impact on a staging site.
How has adopting DebugBear helped you?
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.
We now have a set of tools that allow us to measure the impact of the recommendations we make, and as a result drive increased performance for our clients.
Previously we relied on Google's CrUX data as our main KPI but it would take weeks before we’d see the positive impact of our recommendations. Adopting a proper lab testing setup gave us more confidence we’d see the end benefit.
We also found Lighthouse tests to vary significantly based on computer spec. Debugbear gave us a testing environment that was benchmarked and wouldn’t change based on other variables.
What made you choose DebugBear over other products?
We tested a lot of other tools (e.g. GTMetrix, WebPageTest) but Debugbear had the best UX and all the features I needed to solve CWV issues for a client.
What's an example of how your team has benefitted from DebugBear?
As a result of fixing CWV issues for a client we saw page 1 rankings increase by 28%.
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