Show HN: Generate a free visual sitemap by crawling any website

In addition to Screaming Frog, which is very well-known in the industry, you may also be interested din Sitebulb, which seems to have been inspired by Screaming Frog but took a slightly different approach to the presentation of the audit information.

saimiam• 5 years ago

I have a react app website which seems to break your crawler. A future enhancement may be to run JavaScript inside the crawler to generate the site.

owor9• 5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback.

We have looked into developing the crawler for SPAs, but haven't managed to create a robust enough crawler just yet.. we'll get there one day!

jtwaleson• 5 years ago

Cool. Not sure if you use the sitemap to fetch by default, but if you don't then I'm really impressed by the speed! Some feedback: the prices on the pricing page look bad for me on mobile (android, chrome).

owor9• 5 years ago

We do offer an XML sitemap importer if you're in a hurry, but the free generator is always from a fresh crawl :)

Thanks for letting us know about the pricing page on mobile!

gildas• 5 years ago

This is something you can do with SEO4Ajax [0] (shameless plug).

[0] https://www.seo4ajax.com/

dmje2• 5 years ago

Really nice. I'm definitely your market (micro digital agency owner) - but feedback on pricing: I think it's the wrong model.

I'd prefer to pay per project rather than per month. I think this makes more sense at the lower end / for the "freelance" tier.

Say I do 5 web projects a year. Each one is reasonable budget, and mapping is a core part. From a psychology pov I'd much rather pay (say) $200 one off for each project (maybe based on a cost per page) fee than a rolling per month cost on a thing I'm only using intermittently.

Money wise, my response is silly, I know, but I think the psychology at play here is important. As a small company I don't like to spend money monthly on a thing I don't use whereas when client has just paid me a big deposit for a new gig, I'm happy to pay.

For larger tiers, cool. But a per page "once off" would make sense to me.

owor9• 5 years ago

Thanks for your feedback dmje.

We've had similar discussions with customers in the past - we've found the vast majority (90%) are happy to pay monthly, and the remainder are very vocally against.

We are looking to accomodate both sides, and the current plan is to offer a subscription 'pause', where all of your existing data is stored for free, and you can unpause to edit/create new projects.

It's still being worked out, but hopefully this will be a happy medium ground in the future.

Mauricebranagh• 5 years ago

The limit of 5000 might be a bit low for larger sites is this pages or URLS?

I am thinking ecomerce and classified ads sites

methyl• 5 years ago

If I may give you an advice.

If you want to justify monthly payments, figure out how to provide ongoing value. In your case, it could be that you will update sitemaps in the background and notify users about changes. That way, it’s much easier to see the reason behind recurring payments.

dmje2• 5 years ago

Hey - thanks - I reckon a hybrid would work well. So the tiers for those that are happy with a regular payment, or a "pay per page" for those like me who are maybe more project based. Will be interesting to see what you do!

strongbond• 5 years ago

I agree. I'm turned off by the way everything is a subscription nowadays, even if you only use a service a discrete and specific number of times. Not your fault I know :-) everyone is doing it! But there are only so many annuities I'm happy to contribute to. I get the feeling that we're all being nickel and dimed to death right now.

It looks very nice, by the way.

js4ever• 5 years ago

you should rate limit this, or it's a DDOS as a service ...

owor9• 5 years ago

We use an auto-throttling algorithm for the crawler to ensure we are a 'polite' crawler!

We also send a unique user-agent with every request, so any host can easily block us if required - luckily, this has never happened so far.

Tepix2• 5 years ago

Going to the website i don't see where i can "generate a free visual sitemap by crawling any website". Is it just me?

The pricing page doesn't list any free options.

I can create an empty sitemap but how do I crawl a website then?

owor9• 5 years ago

Hey Tepix - head to https://rarchy.com/sitemaps/visual-sitemap-generator and enter the website you wish to crawl in the left-hand side input.

This will crawl the site & generate a visual sitemap without requiring you to signup for an account.

Tepix2• 5 years ago

I see the issue now, with uBlock Origin active the input field is invisible.

I noticed another issue if you enter "domain.com" into the input field but the website redirects only the starting page to "www.domain.com" the links in the map may not work because they lack the "www." prefix

huhtenberg2• 5 years ago

We're having trouble crawling that website. Please try again...

It'd be helpful to know what the trouble was exactly. Some troubles are non-retryable.

owor9• 5 years ago

Noted, we'll look into returning more descriptive messaging for common errors.

huhtenberg2• 5 years ago

It'd also useful to have an option to generate a full sitemap once, for a fixed fee, sans subscription.

Show HN: Generate a free visual sitemap by crawling any website

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