Optimizing your website: the best tools for 2026

For optimize your website e rispettare le regole della, SEO si devono prendere in considerazione molti parametri indipendenti dalle parole chiave, come la facilità di navigazione, la velocità e l’assenza di errori di codice nella programmazione.

In this article we will look at some of the tools we use at SHM Studio, a web agency in Milan, to improve SEO and optimize our clients' sites. A well-designed, easy-to-navigate, and fast site leads to real results:

• 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: offrire un’usabilità ottimale può distinguere il  sito web dalla concorrenza, aumentando così la sua competitività sul mercato.

Optimize your website, the best tools to use in 2026 

Molto spesso, durante l’optimization of a website, there is a risk of overlooking a whole series of secondary elements that nevertheless have a significant impact on overall performance.  

One example is programming code, sometimes poorly structured or uncompressed, which can significantly slow down page loading. Similarly, broken links and image weight are often ignored, but 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 software performs a quick analysis and provides a report of strengths and 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 in identifying unindexed links, especially if there is an important information 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, this plugin is a formidable ally. Broken link checker is a tool designed to constantly monitor the links on your site, identifying broken or broken links.

Damaged links may result from changes in the URL of a linked page or cessation of activity of external websites. The plugin Broken Link Checker rende l’individuazione dei link rotti e non funzionanti un processo automatizzato e efficiente, estremamente semplice da adoprare.

Wave

You can use Wave to 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, then provide you with useful suggestions for resolving these situations. You can integrate this tool into your search engine as an extension, allowing you to easily check for warnings and structural problems in the code that can compromise 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. With just a few clicks, Optimizilla offers you the ability to optimize your site's images while avoiding the use of expensive and complex software such as Photoshop. 

 Its great advantage lies in preserving the quality of the images even after you have optimized them: by uploading them directly from your desktop or via URL, you can indeed 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 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 website 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 review it on each browser and device combination to identify any display, navigation, or performance issues. This allows them to make the necessary corrections before the official launch of the new design, ensuring that the site is optimized and works properly on all devices and browsers used by their user base. 

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is a powerful tool that can be extremely useful in optimizing your website. It allows you to get a detailed view of user behavior on your pages, their interactions and navigation paths, helping 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 purchasing process smoother and more intuitive. 

Pingdom

Pingdom is a tool that allows you to monitor the performance of your Web site, measuring page load times and identifying areas of the site that may need improvement in speed and overall efficiency.

For example, imagine running an e-commerce business and receiving reports from users complaining of slow loading times during the checkout process. Using Pingdom, you can run a speed test and identify what specific elements are slowing down page loading, such as unoptimized images or heavy scripts.  

With this information, you can make the necessary changes to optimizing pages, maximizing the possibility of conversions. 

GTMetrix

GTMetrix is a tool we often use to check the “health” of our clients' sites. In fact, it provides us with a detailed analysis of the performance of the site under consideration by evaluating crucial aspects 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 also identifies critical issues that slow down page loading and provides us with specific suggestions on how to solve 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 to monitor page load times, but a tool that through a deep scan of the site provides a wide range of data to fully understand its “health status.”. 

It allows you, for example, to identify 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.

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 page. PageSpeed Insights. This tool is well known by both developers and 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 such as loading speed metrics, time taken to render the page, server response time, and total loading times. In addition, an in-depth analysis is provided on performance related to the display of visual content, such as images and videos on the site.  

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 pages faster, more efficient and perform better. 

If you find that your website is slow, you need not worry, because there is always room for improvement.

In this article we have reviewed some of the best tools of 2026 for optimizing your website. From performance evaluation to fixing code errors, these toola offer a wide range of features. With them you can improve user experience and increase online visibility. How digital agency in Milan, SHM Studio regularly uses these tools to ensure excellent results for clients. We are here to help you optimize every aspect of your website and realize your digital ambitions.  

Contact us for a free consultation and find out how we can improve your website together for maximum online success. 

Comparison table of the best tools for optimizing a website

FAQ sull’ottimizzazione dei siti web

1. Why is optimizing a website critical for Google ranking?

Ottimizzare un sito non significa solo renderlo più veloce, ma migliorare struttura tecnica, accessibilità, qualità del codice e user experience. Strumenti come PageSpeed Insights permettono di analizzare le performance e le Core Web Vitals, fattori che incidono direttamente sul ranking organico. Un sito lento o con errori tecnici penalizza sia l’esperienza utente sia la visibilità sui motori di ricerca.

2. How much do broken links affect SEO?

I link non funzionanti compromettono la navigabilità e trasmettono segnali negativi ai motori di ricerca. Tool come W3C Link Checker o Broken Link Checker aiutano a individuare e correggere rapidamente questi problemi, soprattutto in siti con molte pagine o contenuti aggiornati frequentemente.

3. Is accessibility really important for private companies as well?

Sì. L’accessibilità non riguarda solo enti pubblici, ma tutte le aziende che vogliono ampliare il proprio pubblico e migliorare l’esperienza utente. Strumenti come WAVE consentono di verificare la conformità agli standard WCAG, individuando problemi di contrasto colori, immagini prive di tag ALT e altre criticità che possono limitare la fruizione del sito.

4. What is the difference between speed test and full technical audit?

I test di velocità, come quelli effettuati con Pingdom o GTmetrix, analizzano tempi di caricamento e performance delle pagine. Un audit tecnico completo, invece, include anche scansioni SEO strutturali con strumenti come Screaming Frog, che verificano meta tag, redirect, errori 404 e struttura delle URL.