Website performance audits and tools

Privacy

Your privacy

As you use our website, sign up for and use our service we will collect and use a variety of data about you. This document explains how we will use, share and protect your data.

Human readable

Privacy is important enough to make this document human readable. If you don't understand anything or have any questions, please contact us. If you don't understand something, it's poorly written, we will fix it and we will owe you for taking the time to help us.

Using our website

This website uses Google Analytics and Google Search Console. As you use our website, Google will collect all sorts of data and share some of it with us. We will use it to improve the service, improve how we market it and for personal vanity. The founder will brag on Twitter at all the various milestones like first 100 visitor day, first 1000th visitor day and 1,000,000th visitor. His long suffering Mom will get the full force of the bragging, delivered via telephone.

Signing up

When you sign up, we have to collect some information from you. First, we'll need to know what website you want us to audit. We'll use that information so that we provide the service you are paying for. Second, we'll have to collect some contact information so that we can send our findings to you. And finally, we need you to pay. We will never have access to (nor request) your credit card number. However, our processor will have to collect cardholder information like your name, billing address and the like. That's all the information we need.

We will only use this information to provide the service and get paid. You may wish to provide other information so we can include it on your invoice. Anything else you provide is strictly voluntary and we will only use it to add to your invoice. An example of this would be a PO number or something similar.

While we are coming to an agreement, we hope you tell us things about your website, traffic patterns and business needs. We will use this information to schedule your site for the automated portion of the audit and to make sure that our audit captures the information that will be most useful to your business.

The crawl process

SiteImp is built around a very powerful robot named Trixie. Trixie is powerful and fast, but sometimes the results will be shocking to you. You may discover that private documents are actually accessible to the public. When Trixie finds documents, she triggers other bots to scan those pages and collect a variety of metrics. Bots download and save links but that is the only content they collect from your website. If Trixie finds things you wish were private, please send Greg an email and ask for his help securing those documents and making sure they're really not accessible to the public.

We collect a number of metrics during these crawls and use these metrics to generate your audit, come up with recommendations and answer your questions.

After the crawl

We store completed audits and the metrics we calculate for four reasons. Each of these reasons could impact you so please consider carefully whether this fits your needs:

  1. We store metrics to improve the quality of our service. SiteImp learns from every report it runs and the recommendations keep getting better the more the system learns.
  2. We store metrics so we can show you how far your site has progressed/regressed between audits.
  3. We store metrics so we can refund money/run new reports when we make mistakes. Bugs happen and they are our fault. They are certainly not your responsibility and frankly, you all deserve to be treated way better than the mainstream software industry treats you. When we screw up (we will), we will make up for our mistakes. We have to store potential mistakes so we can find and make up for them.
  4. Internal validity. As we make changes to our algorithm, we want to make sure that every other report we have ever written is still valid. If our changes make more than a 15% difference in your scores, you deserve either a brand new report or a refund.

Regardless, we never have access to any of your website content and only have metrics we calculated via a robot. The robot collects public information that anyone could calculate with a web browser. We will store numbers like the observed first input delay on your contact page.

The audit report

When we are finished our audits, we will send you a report. Whoever writes the report will have access to your name, contact information and all the data our audit collected on you. They will need this data in order to contact you, give you the report you paid for and answer your questions.

When they give you the report, they will tell you that it contains all the data we collected on you. They will explain that we prefer to keep it (for the four reasons above), but then they will offer to delete the whole report for you. If you've actually read this privacy policy, tell them that you know because you read the privacy policy before giving us any data. If you say that, you'll get a special reward.

Most people don't read privacy policies, so we could put completely irrelevant things here like "purple monkey dishwasher." If you read this, contact us because again you'll get a special reward. Reading privacy policies is the most important thing that nobody does on the internet. If you do, you're really cool and you're getting a reward. Every company should do this.

After the sale

After the sale, you have a choice to make. You can choose to sign up for our email newsletter, sign up for the founders "you've paid me and I feel responsible for you" mailing list, or choose to be left alone entirely. If you choose to be left alone entirely, we won't be able to contact you if we later find problems with the version of the product that you received.

If you want us to delete everything we have on you, please ask. Greg built the system so that it matches his ideas of privacy. We can either provide or delete everything we have collected with three mouse clicks. Please ask - Greg has worked in this industry for a very long time and nobody has ever asked him that before.

Other companies

This website relies upon other companies to function. It is hosted on DigitalOcean and as mentioned uses Google properties to track traffic, brag, celebrate as often as possible and monitor marketing performance. Those companies will get access to your data through association and you will also be governed by their privacy policies. Rather than link to them directly, please visit their websites to make sure you are reading the most current version possible.

In fact, if one thing comes out of reading this, start reading privacy policies. Make sure you know how big infrastructure companies like Google, Meta, DigitalOcean, Amazon and the like treat your personal data. And hopefully use that knowledge to decide how much you really pay for free services. Take control of your privacy - you're worth it.

Testimonials and our future relationship

As far as SiteImp is concerned, as soon as we are finished the audit, you no longer exist unless you contact us. We will leave you alone unless absolutely necessary and will keep all details of our past relationship completely private. If you choose to leave a testimonial, we would love to host it on our website. However, we will never resort to cheap branding techniques like 'used by' logos without express permission. Nor will we ever use your brand to drum up interest in our brand.

If you're our customer, it is nobody's business but ours.

We will always provide whatever information we have collected upon request. And we will always delete whatever information we have collected upon request. Your privacy is incredibly important. Please contact us if we can help you preserve it.