You take your car to the mechanic, yourself to a doctor, and your dear old cat to a vet, but where do you take your website for a routine check? Fortunately, you don’t have to go anywhere, but instead make use of many incredibly useful online checking tools that will do the work for you. Routine checks of how your website is performing across several areas will save much hassle in the long run, after all, prevention is always better than a cure.
Of course, it’s always tempting to disregard any checks and simply think that “My website seems fine, why should I bother with this?” The answer to this is that several potential website problems aren’t always visible on the surface, and it will take one or more of the following tools to delve deep into the site and perform a thorough check. From broken links to online safety to mobile responsiveness, here are a few online tools we think it’s worth using for your website.
Mobile
Google is not just a search engine, but a company that genuinely wants websites to be the best they can be. There are many useful services under the Google banner, including Analytics, Docs, Adwords, to name a few, but there is another beneficial online tool worth mentioning, and that’s Think With Google. The service will test your site to see how it performs on mobile devices, provide you with a score out of 100 (covering mobile friendliness, mobile speed, and desktop speed) and then give comprehensive feedback on how to improve, if necessary.
According to Google, it’s said that “People are five times more likely to leave a mobile site that isn’t mobile-friendly” and that “Nearly half of all visitors will leave a mobile site if the pages don’t load within 3 seconds.” So, if anyone is going to give you criticism on your site’s mobile capabilities, then Google is definitely the company to trust.
SSL
It goes without saying that any home business needs to have an SSL certificate, as you owe it to your customers to provide a safe and secure transaction every time. Thing is, SSL certificates can be faulty or even expire, so there is every reason to check the strength of your SSL as soon as possible. This can be done with this SSL checker from 1&1. The free tool will inform you if your certificate is valid and if there are any potential security gaps.
Furthermore, with the knowledge that Symantec – one of the world’s largest online security organizations – recently sold faulty SSLs unknowingly (which they later revoked), the time has never been riper to test your own site’s SSL.
Links
Finally, inspecting the validity of all your internal and external links could be a time-consuming task, if it weren’t for Check My Links for Chrome, that is. Once added, the tool will crawl through a webpage and highlight in green which links are working correctly, and highlight in red which ones are broken. This is useful not just for when you’d like to test your page before it goes live, but also to examine older pages which may well have defective links.
Overall, there are dozens of online web tools that offer helpful tests regarding your website’s health, but these are three great ones to get you going. As long as these tests are done regularly, then you’ll be able to rest easier, knowing your site is free of bugs and errors.
