I Built a Free Browser-Based HEIC Converter, Then Found the Real Growth Bottleneck

I built LivePhotoKit as a privacy-first browser tool for converting HEIC images and working with Apple Live Photos.

The product was already live. The converter worked. The site had a sitemap, canonical tags, structured data, and indexable pages.

But “the website works” is not the same as “the product is growing.”

What I audited

I ran a full indexability audit across eight small tools, covering 745 sitemap URLs.

The audit checked:

• HTTP status
• redirects
• canonical consistency
• noindex directives
• orphaned sitemap pages
• duplicate titles
• duplicate page bodies

The result was surprising: the technical layer was largely clean. There were no broken sitemap URLs, canonical mismatches, accidental noindex pages, or duplicate-content clusters in the current sitemap.

The real bottleneck was discovery and user evidence.

The hidden ads.txt problem

LivePhotoKit had an ads.txt file in the local project, but it was missing from production.

The cause was simple: a broad rule in .gitignore excluded ads.txt, so the file never reached the repository or deployment.

I removed the incorrect ignore rule, committed the file, redeployed the site, and verified the production response.

This was a good reminder that a local file is not a deployed asset. Every important SEO or monetization file needs a production check.

Measuring real product use

Page views alone cannot tell me whether the tool is useful, so I added events for the actual conversion funnel:

• files selected
• conversion succeeded
• conversion failed
• ZIP downloaded

Now the product can answer better questions:

• Do visitors select a file?
• Do conversions finish?
• Where do failures happen?
• Do users download the result?

These signals matter more than another generic blog page.

What makes the tool useful

LivePhotoKit runs image processing in the browser. Files stay on the user’s device rather than being uploaded to a server.

It supports batch processing and ZIP downloads, making it useful when someone needs to convert several HEIC images quickly.

You can try the free tool here:

Convert HEIC images privately with LivePhotoKit

The lesson

The next step for a small tool is not always “publish more pages.”

Sometimes the better sequence is:

1. Confirm that the core pages are technically indexable.
2. Fix production-only problems.
3. Measure the real user funnel.
4. Earn links from relevant pages.
5. Improve the product based on behavior.

I am using LivePhotoKit as the main product in this experiment. The goal is to turn a working utility into a tool with measurable usage, search visibility, and eventually a real commercial loop.