Search marketing firm Screaming Frog released version 12.0 of its popular SEO Spider tool on Tuesday. The update includes PageSpeed Insights integration, auto-saves for database storage mode and a customizable GUI, amongst other improvements.

Why we should care

Website crawler tools, such as SEO Spider, are valuable resources for analyzing sites, understanding how search engine crawlers navigate pages, audit SEO efforts and identify areas for improvement.

The ability to pull Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and Lighthouse metrics into Screaming Frog’s tool gives SEOs and site owners a source of real-world data that can be used to improve user experience. The database storage mode file-saving and re-opening improvements are helpful for larger site crawls.

More on the update

The new “PageSpeed” tab is integrated with Google’s PageSpeed Insights API and allows users to draw on CrUX and Lighthouse metrics to discover opportunities to decrease load times. The “PageSpeed Opportunities Summary” report may also help site owners identify opportunities at scale.

Database storage mode, which allows users to save their data to their hard drives instead of storing in RAM, now features automatic saving, making re-opening database files quicker than the previous saving process. As a result, users can also resume crawls that might have otherwise been lost due to a sudden crash or computer restart.

SEO Spider’s tabs are now user customizable to appear in any order or removed altogether. The user’s tab preferences will now affect whether the data is stored.

Particular page and link elements can be exempted from crawling to save on memory.

Interested in running SEO Spider in the cloud? Contributor Fili Wiese’s guide also works for version 12.0