The Story of SiteBeacon: How a Simple Idea Became a Full-Fledged SaaS Product to Fight Digital Carbon Emissions

The Spark: Where It All Began Back in 2021, I was working remotely with Lemon Hive — a creative and development agency. My regular responsibilities were already in place, but I was also given a side task: to collect Lighthouse metrics of various websites listed in a spreadsheet. The goal? Identify underperforming websites and reach out to them with cold emails offering optimization help from Lemon Hive.

It was a repetitive, manual task, but my curiosity pushed me to find a smarter way. I stumbled upon a Google Sheets add-on that could fetch PageSpeed data using the Google PageSpeed Insights API — but even that felt slow and inefficient.

That’s when the idea hit me: What if we could automate the entire process using Node.js and hit the API directly? A server-based solution would be faster and far more scalable.

I shared the idea with my CEO — who was also a developer — and together we created a system that could process 50 URLs at once and return all PageSpeed metrics in a downloadable sheet. That first mini tool saved us hours of work and marked the birth of the idea that would become SiteBeacon.

From Hack to Innovation: Birth of Bulk Page Speed With success in-house, we thought: why not share it with the world?

I proposed writing a blog post to showcase the tool so others could benefit too. That’s how “Bulk Page Speed” (BPS) came to life. Our blog gained attention, and internally, BPS became a go-to tool for audits. I even integrated tracking via Google Tag Manager to measure usage.

But I wasn’t done yet.

An even bigger vision began to take shape in my mind: what if we could build a UI-based platform that automatically crawled a full website, fetched all URLs, and delivered detailed PageSpeed reports? We could even allow CSV uploads, create region-based audits, and offer users the ability to analyze entire websites in one go.

Early Development & Growing Pains (2022) In 2022, the first UI was designed by Joy (Sohanur Rahman). Backend development was picked up by Naim, who had just joined the company. But with multiple client projects draining resources, progress slowed. When new competitors like PageSpeed Plus surfaced, we knew we were falling behind.

Still, we didn’t quit. The product was reimagined, this time with multi-region auditing capabilities. But both Joy and our frontend developer Tasfia left, causing another setback.

We pulled together a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) just in time to showcase at BrightonSEO 2022, but the road was rough.

Rebirth and Breakthrough (2023) By early 2023, SiteBeacon finally got the internal recognition it deserved. Lemon Hive’s leadership gave us the green light to move forward seriously. A new team was formed:

• Naim became the Tech Lead.
• Robin joined as the Frontend Developer.
• I was appointed the Product Manager, Business Analyst, and Project Manager.

We also brought in talented UI/UX designers like Shamim Sarder and Arif Hossain. Together, we envisioned a polished, scalable version of SiteBeacon to present at BrightonSEO 2023.

But success didn’t come easily.

Stakeholders insisted on a new login system — something entirely unfamiliar to the developers — which caused critical system malfunctions. At the heart of it was a miscommunication between devs and the CTO regarding server schedulers and queue mechanisms.

In December 2023, I stepped in to deeply analyze the architecture. I discovered flaws in how the scheduler worked and realized our backend hadn’t accounted for proper queuing. That insight helped us resolve the problem in early 2024.

R&D and Advanced Features (2024) Once the foundation was stable, we went all in on innovation.

We added:

• Accessibility compliance tracking with WCAG 2.2.
• Stress testing using JMeter (which I personally handled due to a temporary lack of QA).
• A brilliant QA analyst, Mahedi Hasan, who joined and significantly improved our quality assurance efforts.
• Another backend engineer, Fahim, who began deep research and R&D for upcoming releases.

Then came a game-changing idea: carbon footprint monitoring. Existing tools could only analyze one URL at a time. But I cracked the formula to calculate total website carbon emissions based on every URL on the site. That innovation led to a new name: SiteBeacon — proposed by our Director, after I initially coined it UX Beacon.

Final Product and Legacy (2025) From just a utility, SiteBeacon evolved into a comprehensive SaaS platform:

• Tracks performance, accessibility, and carbon emissions.
• Introduced Real User Monitoring (RUM) to measure actual visitor impact.
• Helps businesses align with GHG Corporate Emission Standards.
• Suggests page-by-page optimizations to reduce digital carbon footprint.

We finalized the logo (green leaf representing sustainability) and worked relentlessly to deliver a polished UI — thanks to Arif, who brought my vision to lifeby coming up with an extraordinary design. The content side was handled beautifully by Shamsi Nur, our Content Manager, who worked closely with me on blogs and website copy. Finally, on January 20, 2025, we launched the full version of SiteBeacon.

A Heartfelt Goodbye Just as we celebrated the release, I made a difficult decision: to resign from Lemon Hive in pursuit of new opportunities. But my journey with SiteBeacon will always remain one of the most fulfilling chapters of my life. Despite:

• Changing stakeholder requirements,
• Unrealistic timelines,
• Limited resources,
• Technical knowledge gaps…

…we built something that truly matters — a product born from real-world frustration, crafted with passion, and aimed at making the digital world more sustainable.

Special Thanks & Team Behind the Vision SiteBeacon was my brainchild — envisioned, conceptualized, and led by me — but it was built by a team of warriors. Here’s a nod to everyone who helped shape this journey: Core Contributors by Year: 2021: Rifat Bin Rahman 2022: Joy (Sohanur Rahman), Tasfia Islam, Durjoy Talukdar Naim 2023: Shamim Sarder, Arif Hossain, Shahadat Robin 2024: Mahedi Hasan, Shahariar Imtiaz Fahim, Shamsi Nur, Hasibul Hossain, Koushik Saha Special Thanks:
Mr. Najib Hasan (CTO) — for the system architecture and technical oversight Lemon Hive’s Director and CEO — for trusting me and believing in the product

Final Words SiteBeacon is more than a tool. It’s a testament to what happens when curiosity meets purpose. If you’re a digital agency, business owner, or developer who cares about web performance, sustainability, and real-world innovation — I invite you to try SiteBeacon. Because the future of the internet should be faster, cleaner, and greener.

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/@sifat147/the-story-of-sitebeacon-how-a-simple-idea-became-a-full-fledged-saas-product-to-fight-digital-cae6babe3caf