How to improve screenshot quality
The quality and accuracy of your screenshots may be improved when you:
- Change the Capture Settings;
- Add extra URL parameters;
- Change server settings.
Let us explain more in detail what the possible options for this are. But first some background on the cause of possible screenshot flaws:
Challenges for a perfect screenshot
Unfortunately, computers are not as smart as people. Even though we keep tweaking & improving our ‘render engine’ (let’s say, the browser that makes the screenshot) it’s not always possible to capture each URL and/or every element on that page. Stylesheets and Javascript can sometimes fool our engine, which results in less accurate results. Roughly we do capture 95% perfect. And for the other 5%, we have some suggestions that might improve the screenshots.
Since we keep tweaking our engine and you probably keep improving your site, we advise you to regularly check if your URLs are processed good enough to your liking.
Improvement suggestions
Below you will find some suggestions for getting better screenshots.
Change the Capture Settings
The following settings can be changed from your Webpage Capture Settings when you Add or Edit a URL.
Height: The recommended setting is 'Auto'. Our software will try to determine the exact height of the page and capture that. If it fails to get the correct height - for example when it's a page that loads extra records when scrolling down - you may want to select a fixed capture height from the drop-down.
Delay: We capture the screenshot when we receive an alert that the page has been loaded. However, this alert is not always reliable. Often elements are loaded afterward, to reduce the waiting time of the initial page load. Therefore we provide an extra delay of 1-60 seconds, where 3 seconds is initially recommended.
Add extra URL parameters
If you want to force a certain behavior or layout from your website, you might be able to allow extra URL parameters. Example: www.yourdomain.com/category/page?user=stillio. The ?user=stillio part can be such a parameter that can be used in your website to change stuff, like: don't show popups, force a certain banner, disable specific Javascript, etc.
The advantage of these parameters is that it doesn't affect regular visitors, but allows you to get the best results in your Stillio screenshots.
Change server settings
System administrators and webmasters hate bots: Automated website traffic not caused by a real person. It may be a bot that tries to find flaws in your website security, copies your content or worse.
We also use bots ... but 🤖 our bots are friendly! If you inform your system administrator that you use our service they might be able to mark our traffic as trusted, by whitelisting our IP addresses. If you are getting blocked from a 3rd party site, you can check our possible workarounds.
Good luck! And don't hesitate to get in touch with us if you need additional assistance.