For optimize your website in terms of SEO, it is not enough to simply enter keywords.
It is also crucial to make sure the site is easy to navigate, fast, and without code errors.
In this article, we will look at some useful tools that we use at SHM Studio, web Milan agency, to make our clients achieve these goals:
- Improved user experience: Well-designed tools optimize user navigation, making interaction with site content more intuitive.
- Reducing the rebound rate: optimal usability reduces the likelihood that users will leave the site, helping to maintain a low abandonment rate and increasing user engagement.
- Increased conversions: optimized usability simplifies the user's path to the desired action, such as a purchase or signing up for a newsletter, positively influencing the conversion rate.
- Building a positive reputation: A website with high quality usability helps to establish a positive reputation for the brand.
- Increased competitiveness: offering optimal usability can distinguish the website from the competition, thus increasing its competitiveness in the market.
Optimize your website, the best tools to use in 2024
In the process of optimization of a website, it is common to overlook aspects that, although they seem minor, have a significant impact on overall performance.
One example is site code that is often poorly structured or uncompressed, which can significantly slow down page loading.
Similarly, broken links and image weight are often ignored, but they are critical to ensure optimal experience and performance. Fortunately, there are dedicated tools that make it easy to control these aspects.
Let us see in detail what they are.
W3C Validator
Most companies use W3C Validator to keep the quality of one's website high. Its main feature is to check the stability of HTML code and, above all, to pay attention to the overall usability of the site.
By entering the URL of the page to be examined, the tool performs a quick analysis and gives you a report of strengths and, more importantly, weaknesses. By identifying any vulnerabilities in usability, you can take specific action on the affected sections, minimizing problems that could negatively affect the experience of users visiting your web pages.
W3C Link Checker
W3C Link Checker is a powerful tool that allows you to quickly review all the pages on your Web site, identifying hyperlinks that do not work or lead to pages that are not relevant to your business.
If your goal is optimize your website, this tool can be particularly useful for identifying unindexed links, especially if your site has an important informational component with many backlinks. Even for e-commerce and other platforms with limited use of the backlink, a quick check on existing connections can bring significant benefits.
Broken link checker
If your site uses the WordPress CMS, the plugin is formidable ally. This tool is designed to constantly monitor the links on your site, identifying broken or broken links.
These damaged links can result from a number of factors, such as changes in the URL of a linked page or cessation of activity of external websites. Identifying and promptly resolving these problems, which can easily escape superficial inspection, is crucial; the plugin Broken Link Checker makes this check an automated and efficient process that is extremely easy to adopt.
Wave
When you decide to use Wave, you need to specifically assess the accessibility of your website. From a technical standpoint, this tool is designed to assist people with disabilities by identifying accessibility errors and adhering to WCAG guidelines to ensure an optimal user experience when navigating your site.
For example, Wave can automatically detect problems such as inadequate color contrast or the absence of alternative descriptions for images. It then provides you with useful suggestions for solving these problems. You can integrate this tool into your search engine as an extension, which will allow you to easily check for warnings and structural problems in the code that can impair the user experience.
It is a reliable and easy to install solution with useful features for any type of web page.
Optimizilla
An extremely useful tool, especially if you have an image-rich website, is . With just a few clicks, Optimizilla offers you the ability to optimize your site's images, avoiding the use of expensive and complex software such as Photoshop.
Its great advantage lies in preserving the quality of images even after optimizing them. By uploading images directly from your desktop or via URL, you can achieve high-quality results without having to spend too much time adjusting proportions and formats. This is an ideal solution if you are unfamiliar with the world of graphics and digital formatting.
BrowserStack
BrowserStack is a useful tool for Optimize your website. It allows developers and testers to view and test the site on a wide range of devices and browsers, thus ensuring a consistent and optimal experience for all users, regardless of the device or browser used.
For example, a team of developers working on a new graphic for a company's Web site can use BrowserStack to ensure that the new design Is optimized for user experience on a wide range of devices and browsers.
Before release, they can load the website on various versions of browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer on different devices, including desktops, tablets and smartphones.
They can then examine the website on each browser and device combination for any display, navigation, or performance issues. This allows them to make the necessary corrections before the official launch of the new design.
This process ensures that the site is optimized and functions properly on all devices and browsers used by their user base.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is a powerful tool that can be extremely useful for optimize your website. It allows you to get a detailed view of user behavior on your site, their interactions, and their navigation paths. This helps you identify critical aspects, and areas that could be optimized to improve user experience and increase engagement.
For example, suppose you have a e-commerce website and notice that many users abandon the shopping cart during the checkout process.
Using Microsoft Clarity, you can view user session records to understand exactly where abandonments are occurring, and identify any usability or navigation issues that may be causing them. With this information, you can make the necessary changes to your site to make the purchase process smoother and more intuitive, thereby improving conversions and overall optimizing the user experience on your platform.
Pingdom
Pingdom is a tool that allows you to monitor the performance of your website, identifying any loading problems early on. It allows you to measure page load times, identifying areas of your site that may need improvement in speed and overall efficiency.
For example, imagine running an e-commerce website and receiving reports from users complaining of slow loading times during the checkout process. Using Pingdom, you can run a site speed test and identify what specific elements of the site are slowing down page loading, such as unoptimized images or heavy scripts.
With this information, you can make the necessary changes to Optimize your website, maximizing conversions.
GTMetrix
GTMetrix is a tool we often use to check the "health" of our clients' websites. Indeed, it provides us with a detailed analysis of the performance of the site under consideration by evaluating crucial factors such as page load time, file size, and server response speed. Through a series of metrics and recommendations, GTmetrix also provides valuable information to improve user experience, and consequently achieve better search engine rankings. It identifies trouble spots that slow down page loading and provides us with specific suggestions on how to fix them, such as compressing images, reducing JavaScript and CSS files, and optimizing caching.
By using GTmetrix regularly, you can therefore constantly monitor your site's performance and implement fixes whenever necessary.
Screamingfrog
Screaming Frog is not just a tool for monitoring page load times; it is much more than that. Its versatility is its real strength. This Screaming Frog tool scans the site, obtaining a wide range of crucial data to fully understand its "health status."
It allows you to detect a number of critical elements such as broken links, the number of words in resources, the presence or absence of title tags, 404 errors, 301 redirects, and, of course, page load times. You can use Screaming Frog and find that some pages have particularly long load times.
Using the data provided by the tool, you can organize the results in a table in descending order by loading time and easily identify the pages that need the most improvement. This allows you to take targeted action, such as optimizing images or reducing the number of scripts, in order to improve the overall performance of your website.
PageSpeed Insights
If you want to get a complete and detailed overview of the status of your platform. PageSpeed Insights. This tool is very well known by developers, but also by less experienced users, because its results are easy to understand. By analyzing the loading time of individual pages on both mobile and desktop devices, Pagespeed Insights provides a wide range of useful information. These include detailed information on loading speed metrics such as the time it takes for the page to render, server response time, and total loading times. In addition, in-depth analysis is provided on performance related to the display of visual content, such as images and videos on the site.
If you find that your website is slow, you need not worry, because there is always room for improvement.
Mountain View's Pagespeed Insights carefully evaluates your site and gives you a comprehensive list of steps needed to optimize the performance of your website. Not only does it list for you what needs to be done, but it also provides valuable advice on practical actions to implement, suggestions on WordPress plugins to implement, and recommendations on content to deepen. Thanks to it, then, you have all the tools you need to make your website faster, more efficient and perform better.
In this article we have reviewed some of the best tools of 2024 for optimizing your website. From performance evaluation to fixing code errors, these toola offer a wide range of features. With them you can improve the user experience and increase your site's online visibility. How digital agency in Milan, SHM Studio regularly uses these tools to ensure excellent results for our clients. We are here to help you optimize every aspect of your website and realize your digital ambitions.
Do not hesitate to contact us for a free consultation and find out how we can improve your website together for maximum online success.