Alan Draper
Quality assurance testing your website can often mean the difference between a qualified lead and an uptick on your bounce rate. Website speed, frontend functionality, working E-mail contact forms, and mobile friendliness all coalesce into a great website. More importantly, it becomes a website thatthat both search engines and consumers love. Google in particular has been leading the charge with rewarding websites that prioritize user-friendliness. Imagine the business – and the rankings – you could be losing out on if an opt-in is broken and you don’t even know about it.
Quality assurance doesn’t have to break the bank for small businesses, though. There are a number of free tools you can take advantage of to make sure your website is running well from a technical standpoint, and to be compliant with best SEO practices. More importantly, a few of these tools can make sure nothing fishy is going on behind the scenes (note: I have not been paid to promote any of these and I use them commonly for my own testing purposes).
Gone are the days of one-size fits all websites. There are a multitude of different screen sizes, all of which you need to accommodate to maximize your lead conversion and lower your bounce rate. Test Size lets you see how your website looks on different browser sizes. Remember: Search engines take this into account when ranking your website.
Online or brick and mortar, mom and pop or Fortune 1000, getting blacklisted by Google or another major search engine can be a kiss of death when the popularity of search increases by 20% every year. With this tool you can easily check to see if any search engines are blocking your web domain, see why, and see the steps to delisting.
Instantly test how your website looks on any type of smartphone, including Samsung Galaxy Y, Nokia Lumia and iPhone, just by entering a URL. Beyond the obvious benefit of making your site is mobile responsive or your mobile site is working, this can be helpful in seeing if any particular screen sizes have different effects on your mobile site.
Test your website speed at granular levels with this extremely helpful program. You’re given a grade based on a number of functions including how well your website minimizes redirects, minimizing DNS lookups, and using external stylesheets for CSS or JavaScript.
Quickly scan your website for malware, malicious JavaScript code, and anomalies. Sucuri is a product, but their free site scanner does a great job of showing you potential problems. Malware and bad code go beyond causing your website to load slowly; in a worst case scenario, someone unauthorized could have access to your site.
Here’s a great W3C tool: The broken link checker. If you lack a broken link checker plugin or similar functionality on your website, this can be a great way to easily see which links need to be updated or removed from the archives of your content. It also helps you ensure that your redirects are working properly.
All of these tools are free, so there’s no reason to not experiment with your own website right now. See how you look from a different perspective; you may be surprised at what you find!
Image credit: CodeProject
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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Nice list of tools. I had used a couple of them – Mobiletest.me and W3C Broken Link Checker – and they work just fine. I’ll definitely get my hands on the other ones you’ve mentioned. Thanks for sharing.