Cool Free Tools to Optimize Your Website
Is there anything you would improve about your website? If your answer is “I’m not sure,” use these 20 free tools to measure your website's performance in various categories and identify opportunities for improvement.
As is the case with any automated tool, the options listed below do not offer the same level of insight you'll get from a human marketing professional, but each does a great job of identifying issues and helping you decide where to focus your website improvement efforts.
Website Report Card
Want a quick but comprehensive snapshot of your website's quality? If you provide your email address, HubSpot’s WebSite Grader will give you a personalized report with an overall number grade as well as individual scores in the categories of performance, mobile readiness, SEO, and security. You'll also get tips on how to raise your website’s score.
The free version of SEMRush offers a Site Audit tool that gives your website a comprehensive technical audit and flags issues that need to be addressed.
Mobile Friendliness
Mobile internet traffic accounts for about 60% of all web traffic worldwide, so it's crucial that your site provide a great experience for mobile users.
To check if your site is mobile-friendly, take Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to see if your website meets Google's mobile requirements.
MobileMoxie's free Page-O-Scope lets you enter a URL to see how your website displays on a wide variety of mobile devices. You can use the tool for free up to three times a day.
Page Speed
When it comes to websites, lack of speed kills. Slow-loading website pages can hurt your search engine ranking and lead to lower conversion rates and a poor user experience.
To make sure your website isn’t frustrating customers and getting dinged by Google for slow load times, enter your site’s URL into a free page speed tool such as GTmetrix, Pingdom, or Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see site load times and scores on a variety of other factors.
SEO Audit
Keeping up with the latest in SEO best practices is a full-time job, and it’s difficult to know if you’ve made mistakes in attempting to optimize your site.
SEOptimer's free SEO audit tool scans your website and provides simple letter grades for overall SEO as well as individual categories including links, usability, performance, and social.
Screaming Frog's downloadable free version will crawl your entire website to find broken links and errors, analyze page titles and meta data, identify duplicate pages, and more.
Accessibility
Website accessibility means your site can be used by anyone, including those with visual, hearing, or other impairments. To check your website's accessibility, enter your URL in the Website Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) to see errors like missing alt text and poor visual contrast, as well as suggestions for how to meet accessibility standards.
Search Trends
What are people searching for online? The answer can help you develop relevant content ideas to solve your customers' problems. Google Trends shows you the most popular search terms over time and lets you compare search terms and see trending stories and regional interests.
Keywords
If you need help figuring out what keywords to use on your site, Keyword Tool can generate hundreds of keyword terms using your seed term and results from the autocomplete features of Google, YouTube, Bing, and the App Store.
The free keyword research tool from Wordtracker gives you thousands of popular search phrases based on a single keyword, and shows you the search volume, level of competition, and cost-per-click for each term.
The Keyword Generator from Ahrefs lets you choose keywords for Google, Bing, YouTube, or Amazon, in addition to giving you the option of searching in the United States or any other country.
Links
Having the right types of links on your website is one of the best ways to improve your search ranking, boost traffic, establish the authority of your site, and improve the customer experience. But all those benefits are lost if the links don't work.
Your website probably has dozens if not hundreds of links. To make sure none of them are giving users the dreaded 404 error, try BrokenLinkCheck, which not only scans your site for broken links, it tells you exactly where those dead links are located in your HTML code so you can quickly find and fix them.
Ahrefs also offers an excellent Broken Link Checker that will give you a list of all broken links on your website (main URL only or including subdomains), including the referring page, the number of internal and external links from the referring page, and not only the link anchor text but also some of the surrounding text to make the broken link easier to find on your site.
Local Search
If you’re a local business, you need to make sure your customers can find you, and that means being optimized for local search. Check your local listings by entering your business name into Moz Local's Check Listing tool, which tracks your local search engine presence, allows you to check your listings for accuracy, and gives you a local listing score.
Content Duplication
No one has the right to use your website content without your permission. To make sure no one’s scraping your content and reposting it on their own site, use a duplicate content or plagiarism checker to ensure your content isn't being misappropriated.
Copyscape's content checker lets you enter your website's URL and it will conduct an internet-wide search for text that matches your website content. If it finds any results, it gives you links to the website that has copied your content.
If you're concerned about a specific piece of content, Dupli Checker lets you paste up to 1,000 words of text into a search box to see if it matches any other content on the internet.
Interested in checking internal duplicate content on your own website? Enter a URL into Siteliner to see all the instances of duplicate content on your website, by specific page URL. The free version of the tool will scan up to 250 pages of your website.
