Published on February 22nd, 2020 | by Ali Dino
05 Testing Tools to Enhance Your Website’s Performance
If you are running an established website with a decent amount of traffic, you want to make sure that it’s performing well both from a technical and a user viewpoint. Some indicators that reflect the state of the website include the site’s speed, link reliability, and web browser compatibility.
With so many users now accessing sites from browsers on their smartphones, it’s also important to verify that the site is suited and optimized for both mobile access and PC access. Another consideration is to evaluate how well the website caters to visitors with disabilities.
Luckily the web is full of great tools that allow you to quickly gather and analyze your website’s performance, as well as issue recommendations for which areas to direct the lion’s share of improvement toward. Let’s look at some tools available to suit the above-mentioned site optimization needs.
How Fast is Your Website?
Users visiting a website with long wait times can get impatient and frustrated, causing them to leave and go seeking a faster alternative. Google has developed the PageSpeed Insights tool to help quickly retrieve and analyze both lab and field data for a web page. Lab data is a more controlled environment type testing, but this hardly ever holds true for real-world issues, which is why field data is additionally factored in.
After plugging in the URL of the site into a simple prompt, PageSpeed Insights runs a diagnostic on the site and provides a score based on lab data. With a score of 90 or above indicating a fast site, 50 to 90 range indicating a moderate speed, and below 50 indicative of a slow site, this score is only one of numerous diagnostic results this tool will provide.
Do All The Links Work?
Few things turn away site visitors like the inability to access the parts of the site they are looking to get into. Broken links are a very common problem on sites, but there is a web tool, Dr. Link Check, which will allow a URL to be input and will then run an analysis of links on the page and subpages, listing out a count of total links, as well as those links found to have issues.
If you click on the broken link count, the tool generates a list of all links with issues that need to be addressed.
Is The Site Mobile-Friendly?
With so many users accessing websites from their smartphones, it only makes sense that a site should be fully operational for mobile device users. Google-powered Mobile-Friendly Test tool makes this very easy. Simply plugging in the URL of the site will run a quick test of mobile compatibility and will output a page with the front page display of the site, confirmation if it’s mobile-friendly, and a list of any mobile usability errors if any are found.
How Does It Look in Different Browsers?
There are a handful of popular browsers out there and each one of them has its own little quirks. So if you have a website, it’s beneficial to test the site with as many browsers as possible.
BrowserShots allows you to generate screenshots of your websites in dozens of web browsers without having you to install any software on your computer.
Also, Read Content://com.android.browser.home/
Is The Site Accessible to Visitors With Disabilities?
Finally, an important aspect to consider is how users with disabilities can experience your website.
The Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) takes an input URL, analyzes the page’s source code and generates a report with display errors, contrast error and structural inefficiencies that will give people with certain disabilities a hard time enjoying your site.
Conclusion
Building a website doesn’t stop when the site launches – you should consistently test and monitor how it performs. The tools presented in this article will give you recommendations on how to improve different areas of your website. Try them!