We’ve compiled a short list of four free tools that you can use to determine whether your website is as working as hard as you are.
Web Tool 1: Nibbler
Nibbler is a tool that gives you an overview at how your site performs in several areas that are important to having a successful website. It takes into account a wide range of factors, such as mobile accessibility, SEO integration, all the way down to how well the code is optimised. All of these factors are quickly calculated and then combined to give your website an overall score and give you an excellent idea on just how well it’s performing.
Not only that, it’ll also give you advice on what it would take to improve its rating and the overall experience of the site, so you won’t be left wondering where to go with a low score.
Web Tool 2: WebPageTest
Online, speed is everything. An amazing site that takes five minutes to load will always lose out to a site that can be displayed in less than a second. Even a site that can take only a few moments to load in one location can often take much longer in another. WebPageTest’s job is to tell you how much longer. It tests your site’s load time using a multitude of browsers from a multitude of locations. Testing your site as you make improvements shows what sort of an impact your alterations have on the load time of your site – a real tangible indicator of whether you’re heading in the right direction.
Web Tool 3: W3C Markup Validator
The name says it all really, this tool validates markups.
Ok, ok, a little more detail:
Markups, or markup languages are the languages like HTML or XHTML that most websites are built with. As they are built, code can be written poorly or errors can be made. This tool works by going through the code and finding places where errors or inefficiencies are.
It also helps future-proof your websites. An incorrectly coded website that uses the quirks or bugs of a browser to function will fail When the browser changes. By making sure it’s built to proper web standards, you can make sure that all the effort you put in now will still be there during the next browser or OS update.
Web Tool 4: SharedCount
The final way to see the effect of your online presence is to see how much people are talking about you and interacting with your business on social media. SharedCount makes this an easy trick to pull, simply enter in your website’s URL and the program will check the major social media sites and provide a report showing how often you’ve been shared around. Used in conjunction with things like A/B testing and the above tools, you can see what the effect of your website improvement, and provides a simple, easy, all-in-one option to check your effect on the social side of the internet.
There you have it Brisbane! Four free tools to show you what sort of an impact your website design is having, and that it’s up to scratch with current good web design practices. Now take this knowledge and go forth, optimise, improve and make your site the best it can be!
