Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Public-Interest Price Monitoring: Collecting Evidence That Stands Up to Scrutiny
How consumer groups, journalists and compliance teams monitor prices to test discount claims, and how to collect evidence a retailer cannot dismiss.
Priya Nair · October 11, 2026 What Your Legal Team Will Ask Before Approving a Scraping Project
The questions legal and compliance teams ask before they sign off on web data collection, why they ask them, and what a good answer looks like.
Sofia Marin · October 10, 2026 Auditing NAP Consistency Across Local Directories
A business listed with an old phone number or address on a dozen directories confuses customers and search engines. How to audit NAP data and fix what matters.
Daniel Okafor · October 10, 2026 When You Don't Need a Residential Proxy
We fetched 30 public sites from a datacenter IP and through residential exits. Over half needed no proxy at all. How to tell which kind of site you have.
James Meadow · October 9, 2026 Testing Scrapers: Fixtures, Replay and Regression Suites
Scrapers break when sites change, and tests that hit the live site break with them. How to test a scraper with recorded fixtures, replay and daily canaries.
Chris Collins · October 9, 2026 Your Scraper Is Slow and It Probably Isn't the Proxy
We sped up a scraper running through residential proxies 7.5 times without touching the proxy. How to find where the time really goes, and fix it.
Matt Brown · October 8, 2026 Payload Efficiency: What Share of a Scraped Page Is Boilerplate You Paid For
We measured 278 content pages from the top 1,000 sites. The text you want is about 1% of the HTML and a tiny share of what a browser downloads.
Elena Petrova · October 8, 2026 Introducing Shifter's Free Web Proxy, Built on Residential IPs
Shifter Web Proxy is free: open any website through a real residential IP in any of 54 countries, with no signup, no ads and nothing to install.
James Meadow · October 8, 2026 How Fast Do Online Prices Actually Change? A Volatility Study
What published research shows about how often online prices change, from retailer sites to marketplace Buy Boxes, and what it means for monitoring cadence.
Priya Nair · October 7, 2026