Tools

The last part of the book is suggesting some tools to evaluate a website. Since the book is in print and not all tools live forever you’ll find current tools on this page. These tools I use myself.

If something is missing, or if you’d like to ask a question just hit me up on Twitter on @marcusosterberg or use the contact form. Thanks!

Template for documenting your tests in Excel »

Plugins for your web browser

Status 4 Evar »

Plugin for Firefox to bring the status bar back, it’s needed by some legacy versions of plugins (at time of publishing SEO Doctor, lori, for instance).

SEO Doctor »

Plugin for Firefox to give you metrics and suggestions on how to improve the onsite-SEO of the page your looking at.

lori (Life-of-Request-Info) »

Plugin for Firefox. Giving you figures on time before first byte, a page’s total weight and total download time.

Operator »

Plugin for Firefox to notify you if the viwed page is offering any structured data, such as Schema.org and Microformats.

Yahoo! YSlow »

Plugin for several browsers to check a lot of hygiene factors and performance metrics.

Google Speed Tracer »

A Google Chrome-plugin to show details on the page-load. A bit technical perhaps.

Accessibility Evaluation Toolbar for Firefox »

Plugin for Firefox. Great to see if the page’s header structure is correct and lots of more on accessibility.

Web services

Google Structured Data Tool »

Looking for RDFa, Microformats or Schema.org on an URL you enter.

Google Search Console »

Your chance to get feedback and insight in what Googles crawler finds on you website.

Bing Webmaster Tools »

Microsoft’s counterpart of Search Console.

Google Analytics »

Got a couple of views showing quantified statistics on actual users of the website, a page’s loadtime for instance. Also, this is where you find out if your tracking script is up to date.

Google PageSpeed Insights »

Check you website’s speed, some performance metrics and a couple of usability metrics. Is also available as a plugin to Firefox and Google Chrome.

W3Cs code validation tools »

To fins out if a website is following web standard its good to use W3Cs tools – since they are the standards body responsible for the web standards.

WebPagetest »

Check performance metrics and speed from various places around the globe. Suitable for you who don’t want to, or cannot, install software on your computer/device.

Optimizr »

Crawls your site and later on sends you a report of its findings. Looking for dead links, faulty 404-pages, too long pagetitles and much more. Good for finding systematic faults on a website.

Google Mobile-Friendly Test »

Get a simple yes or no answer on a website’s friendliness to mobile-users needs.

Yellow Lab Tool »

Quality-testing different factors, for instance how much old and unnecessary info you got in your stylesheets.

Plugins for WordPress

EWWW Image Optimizer »

Plugin to automatically, losslessly, optimize images you upload to your WordPress-site.

Web analytics, optimizations and SEO specific tools

Rankly.io (non-free) »

Monitor your website’s ranking on the search engines.

Performance Budget Calculator »

Help you find out what values to enter in your performance budget regarding page load time. For instance you can choose at most 10 seconds load-time on a less than optimal 3G connection and the service will calculate the metrics for you.

Calibre (non-free) »

29 dollars a month and you can enlist two websites to be monitored, their response time, time to be visually complete, etc. Perceived performance monitoring.