DesignlyBot is the crawler behind Designly, a curated library of well-designed websites. If you found it in your logs, this page says what it does and how to stop it.
What it does
- It visits only pages an Editor has chosen for the library, or asked it to check again. It does not follow links or crawl a site.
- On each page it takes one screenshot at desktop width and one at phone width, and reads the colours and fonts the page uses.
- It checks published pages again about once a month to see whether the design changed.
- It aims to start captures of the same site at least five seconds apart. A capture loads the page twice, at desktop and phone width, and follows the site's own redirects, so those requests come closer together. It checks your robots.txt (kept for up to a day) for every address it loads.
- It never fills in forms, signs in or buys anything.
How it identifies itself
Its User-Agent is an ordinary browser string followed by DesignlyBot/1.0 (+https://designly.sh/bot). The browser part is there because some hosts refuse visitors without it; the name and this address are always there.
Keeping it off your site
Add this to your robots.txt. DesignlyBot also obeys rules written for every crawler (User-agent: *).
User-agent: DesignlyBot
Disallow: /To take a site that is already in the library out of it, use the removal form. Questions go to hello@designly.sh.