If you are running a website or a blog, it becomes essential to keep track of different statistics that serve as a benchmark for all the hard work that you have done. These statistics may include your search engine rankings, incoming links, keyword density, traffic monitoring, code validation, website speed, mobile compatibility etc. Today I will take you through such free website testing tools that simply kick ass. If you are not using them already, you are just letting the competition win.
1. Pingdom (Website Speed Analysis)
Users have a very low tolerance level for slow loading websites. So, if your website or blog is loading slower than usual, they are bound to navigate off your pages. In order to avoid that situation, you should periodically monitor the loading speeds of your website and optimize it regularly for a faster user experience. Pingdom is a quick testing tool to analyze your website speed. In the report, it tells you your load time, page size and number of file requests being sent to the browser. After the analysis, you can try to reduce the number of file requests, minify the various file sizes or go for a faster hosting service.
2. Nibbler (Overall Website Analysis)
This is one of my personal favorites when it comes to a detailed analysis of your website. It tests your website on parameters like code quality, server behavior, social interest, internal links, popularity, mobile compatibility, printability, domain age and a lot more. It then classifies these results further into four categories – accessibility, experience, marketing and technology with individual scores. Finally it gives out an overall average score. I highly recommend using this tool if you want to find out detailed statistics about your website.
3. Moz (Page Rank and Authority Analysis)
After Google stopped updating the Pagerank algorithm for the last one year, Moz ranking has taken its place appropriately. Pages hold mozRank score on the basis of both quantity and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher these two aspects, the higher the mozRank. Sign up for a free acount on Moz.com website and you can check different stats like Page Authority, Domain Authority, Moz Rank, Backlinks etc. To find your mozRank go to this page and download the relevant browser toolbar extension.
4. Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Even before Google rolled out the mobile-friendly update, there has been this tool that you can use to test the mobile friendliness of your website. Just input the website URL and Google will tell you if your website loads properly on hand-held devices. It even shows you a screen capture of how the website looks on mobiles.
5. Google Structured Data Testing Tool (Schema Validation Testing)
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you should have heard about Schema.org. Google gives preference in ranking to the websites who are optimized with Schema.org Markup code. You can test your website URL in this tool and it will show you the errors or suggestions to mark up your webpage properly.
So here is a question for all of you. What do you guys think about Schema? Do you think it helps the SEO and if yes, in what ways?
