--- title: "CoinStats fixed a Core Web Vitals bug, tripled search impressions" url: https://seomadman.com/studies/coinstats-core-web-vitals-organic-traffic section: studies published: 2026-09-16T00:00:00.000Z modified: 2026-09-16T00:00:00.000Z author: Adam Hafez topics: ["Technical SEO"] --- # CoinStats fixed a Core Web Vitals bug, tripled search impressions ## The short answer CoinStats, a crypto portfolio tracker, had poor Largest Contentful Paint on many pages because it was embedding Base64 images directly in its HTML. After switching roughly 15,000 pages to conventional img src URLs, HTML download size was cut in half. DebugBear's published case study reports both the share of Good URLs and search impressions on those pages increased 3x. ## Key takeaways - CoinStats, a cryptocurrency price and portfolio tracking site, had a slow Largest Contentful Paint and a high bounce rate across many of its pages before the fix. - The root cause was Base64-encoded images embedded directly in the HTML document instead of standard img src URLs, which bloated page weight. - CoinStats updated around 15,000 pages to use img src URLs, which cut the HTML document's download size in half. - DebugBear's published case study reports both the share of "Good URLs" in Search Console and search impressions on those pages increased 3x after the fix rolled out. - The case study does not publish a timeframe, exact before and after scores, or specific URLs, so treat the multiplier as directional, not a precise rate. DebugBear, a Core Web Vitals monitoring vendor, publishes a small library of named customer case studies. One of them covers CoinStats, a cryptocurrency price and portfolio tracking site, and walks through a single root cause, a single fix, and a reported before-and-after change in search performance. Unlike the [Rakuten and Vodafone A/B tests Google itself ran](/studies/rakuten-vodafone-core-web-vitals-case-studies/), this one is a vendor-published customer story rather than a controlled experiment, and it is worth reading with that distinction in mind. ## What was actually broken on CoinStats' pages DebugBear's write-up says CoinStats "was doing poorly on Google's Core Web Vitals" and had a high bounce rate, and that the recurring issue across pages was a slow Largest Contentful Paint. Using DebugBear's tooling, the team traced the cause to how images were served: CoinStats "used to include a lot of Base64 images in the HTML document" instead of linking to them through a normal img src URL. Base64-encoding an image inflates its size by roughly a third and forces the browser to download it as part of the HTML response itself, before the page can start rendering, rather than as a separate, cacheable request. ## What CoinStats changed, and what DebugBear reports it did The fix was narrow: replace inline Base64 images with conventional img src URLs across the site. DebugBear's case study quotes CoinStats' Senior SEO Specialist, Rafayel Begoyan, saying "we've updated around 15,000 pages and saw some nice gains from it," and that the change "cut in half" the HTML document's download size. DebugBear reports the outcome in two figures: the share of "Good URLs," a Search Console Core Web Vitals metric, and search impressions on the affected pages both "increased 3x since implementation." ## Why this is a directional data point, not an audited rate DebugBear's page does not publish a start date, an end date, the raw impression counts behind the 3x figure, or the actual before-and-after Core Web Vitals scores for the pages involved. It is a vendor case study built to sell a monitoring product, told from the customer's side, with one named quote and no independently reproducible numbers. That does not make the underlying claim false, embedding fewer Base64 images in the HTML is a well-understood way to speed up Largest Contentful Paint, but it does mean the "3x" figure should be cited as CoinStats' own reported comparison, not as a rate any site removing Base64 images should expect to match. ## Frequently asked questions ### What exactly was wrong with CoinStats' pages? According to DebugBear's case study, CoinStats scored poorly on Core Web Vitals and had a high bounce rate because Largest Contentful Paint was slow on many pages. The root cause traced to Base64 images embedded directly inside the HTML document rather than referenced through a standard img src URL. ### How many pages did CoinStats actually change? DebugBear quotes CoinStats' Senior SEO Specialist Rafayel Begoyan saying "we've updated around 15,000 pages." Switching those pages to img src URLs instead of inline Base64 images cut the HTML document's download size in half. ### Does "3x" mean search traffic tripled? The case study states that the share of Good URLs in Search Console and search impressions on the affected pages "increased 3x since implementation." DebugBear does not publish a start date, end date, or the underlying raw numbers behind that multiplier, so treat it as CoinStats' own reported comparison rather than an audited figure. ## Sources 1. [How CoinStats Grew Organic Traffic With Better Core Web Vitals](https://www.debugbear.com/case-study/coinstats) - DebugBear (primary)