Want to make sure your business website is performing at its best? Here are the 7 free tools to make your job easier. The best part is: “No coding knowledge required”.
- Uptime Robot: is a brilliant (and not to mention free) tool to monitor the website uptime. When you have a website online, there are so many things that work together to make sure it’s accessible. Sometimes, things may go south. It might be a problem with your hosting provider or the server network or what not. What uptime robot does is, notify you via email when your website goes down, and when it comes back online. This way, you know when your website was down and for how much time.To get started with uptime robot, simply go to their website and register for the free plan. The free plan gives you the monitoring interval of 5 minutes with 50 monitors at your service. This is more than enough unless you run a massive web application or e-commerce website, where downtime of few seconds is a problem. In that case, you can always choose their pro plan, which gives you better frequency and reporting.
- Website Speed Test: Nobody likes a slow website. Neither you nor the potential customer visiting your website. To give you an idea on the importance of the website load time, here’s a trivia: Amazon’s calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 Billion in sales (source). Let that sink in for a moment. So exactly how much time does it take your website to load? Let’s find out with this fantastic tool.Website Speed Test by Pingdom is a super easy to use tool at your rescue. Just go to their website and enter the URL. No signup needed. It’ll take a minute or so to analyze the speed and give you the total size and total load time of your website. To give you precise details it’ll show you, each and every file that downloads while loading your website along with the time each one took. While you may not understand what each of the file does, but you can always go to the person/agency who developed your website and ask them to take care of files with large size or the files with large execution time.
“Umm…I tested my business website, is there anything to compare with? How do I know what’s the ideal loading time?”
Yes, there is. There are several researches done by most prominent IT organizations. The acceptable loading time for any page of your website should be within 5 seconds or less.
- Dead Link Checker: Have you ever been to a website and clicked on a link which eventually took you to “404-page not found”. It feels like a bummer, right? This issue is pretty common and way more serious than you might think. Having a broken link not only hurts SEO but also the user experience and credibility of your organization/website.Thankfully, to our rescue, we have a tool that can check all possible broken links (if any) for you with a single click. Simply, go to Dead link checker and enter the URL and CAPTCHA. It’ll scan your whole website for broken links and give them as a list to you. You can crosscheck the result, by manually opening up any of the broken link(s). Fix them or get them fixed ASAP.
- Google PageSpeed Insights: The holy grail of all tools by google itself. This tool not only grades your website on desktop computers but on mobile devices as well. Along with the page loading speed, it also checks for the user experience both on mobile devices and desktop computers and gives you suggestions on how to improve the same. For e.g., some of the text on your website may be overflowing out of the screen on the mobile devices, this tool will check that out for you.Only downside with the PageSpeed Insights is, it doesn’t give you the detailed report unlike “Website Speed Test” by pingdom. Our best guess is, it is this way just to keep it simple without overwhelming the users with technical jargon.
- W3 Markup Validation: Warning: Using this tool can be overwhelming and you might feel dizzy from all the code this tool’s going to throw up.This is a bit technical yet important tool to check pain areas (mostly in terms of code) of your website. Important because, search engines (like google, yahoo, bing, etc) do not see the website(s) as we humans do. They do not care if it looks to the point. Instead, they analyse the backend code and make their own decision about how good the website is.To use this service, simply go to https://validator.w3.org/ and enter the URL of your website. It’ll to analyse the webpage and throw errors and warnings in HTML code. If that’s all gibberish to you, copy the link of test result and bring it to the attention of person/agency who developed the specific website for your business.
- Open Site Explorer: This is a really wonderful tool by Moz available on freemium basis. The purpose of this tool is to give you an idea about the backlinks and how much authority your website has in the eyes of the search engines. Backlinks are the incoming links to your website. In layman’s terms, it’s just mention of your website on any other website on the web. It’s important to monitor your backlinks since, there can be many spam domains backlinking to your website. This hurts the search ranking terribly and if long enough, google may mark your domain as spam as well along with the others.Using OSE is pretty easy. Simply go to this link and enter the link of your website. After you get on the result page you can filter the data as per your need.
- SiteCheck by Sucuri: The most important part of making sure that everything is fine in this digital age is to check for any malware infections. Luckily, we have a user-friendly tool to check-up by ourselves. SiteCheck scans your website for any malware infections, if at all your website is blacklisted by any of the authority services.
To use this tool is a fairly easy task. Just go to https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/ and enter your web address. Make sure you check all 3 tabs on top section of the result page.
If your website got a green signal in all seven tools above, it’s time to celebrate (invite us as well). But if not, it’s time to contact your web development team and fix the issues.
These were the seven tools we think are super easy to use for non-technical business owners. Do you have any more tools at your disposal? Please, share them in the comments below.