Give Your Website a Health Check with These Free Tools

Written by Kevin Liew on 15 May 2020
158,784 Views • Miscellaneous

Creating a successful website goes beyond good design and good content. Factors such as broken links, page speed, security, and SEO-friendliness can seriously limit the growth of a site and should be monitored closely.

In this article, I will introduce you to six free services that will give your website a health check and help you improve both visitor experience and search rankings. Give them a try – they don’trequire you to be a tech guru and are super simple to get started with.

1. Dr. Link Check

The first service in this list, Dr. Link Check, crawls your website and analyzes the links on each page. It checks for both broken links and links that may lead your visitors to malware. Both types of links create a bad user experience, so it’s important to get rid of them.

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Additionally, the broken link check is pretty advanced; it checks not only that a website exists, but also that it is not a parked domain. Even if a website was up and running when you linked to it, it’s domain name registration may expire, the SSL certificate may have been revoked, or there may be a problem with the web server.Either way, Dr. Link Check will let you know of any broken links so you can promptly fix them.

2. OpenLinkProfiler

OpenLinkProfiler is a tool that will scan for links that refer to your site, also known as backlinks. Backlinks play a role in how well your website will rank, so it’s important to keep tabs on them. This tool makes it easy to do so by showing you your website’s backlinks in an easy to understand dashboard.

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OpenLinkProfiler’s dashboard gives you quick access to metrics such as unique links, trusted links, links to your homepage, and more. In case you need more in-depth information, there are many tabs to choose from on the left-hand side of the interface. These tabs link to important information such as suspicious links, anchor text, and domains that link to your website. You can also keep an eye on the type of websites that link to you on the “Link Contexts” tab, which lets you know if your backlinks come from blogs, forums, wikis, news sites, etc.

3. WebPageTest

The third website tool on this list is WebPageTest. Although the first impression of this website is that it looks a bit more dated than the other website tools, don’t let looks fool you. WebPageTest shows you a lot of useful information on the performance of your website, which plays a factor in how well your website will rank. While your website may load fast on your computer, that doesn’t mean it loads fast for everyone. With WebPageTest, you can select where you want the test to be run from, as well as which browser, allowing you to test how your website will perform on multiple devices with different internet speeds.

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After loading your website, WebPageTest will redirect you to a simple dashboard containing important metrics about your website’s performance. From this dashboard, you can easily see metrics such as how fast your website loaded, how much bandwidth it took, as well as more advanced metrics like CPU usage. Just telling you what’s wrong with your website wouldn’t be much use, so WebPageTest includes tips on how to improve your website’s performance. 

4. Mozilla Observatory

Unlike the other website tools on this list, Mozilla Observatoryis more geared towards website security than performance or SEO. All you need to do is enter your website’s URL, and you’ll get redirected to a dashboard once the website scan is complete. This dashboard will contain your website’s security score, along with a breakdown of each individual part of the score.

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Mozilla Observatory also lets you know which aspects of your website’s security you need to fix, as well as how to improve your score. On top of the basic security tests done by default, you can also view information about your website’s SSL certificate, as well as view the results of a few third-party tests all in one place.

5. HEY META

HEY META is a service designed to help improve your website’s meta tags. Meta tags are a bit of code that goes in the head section of your website’s HTML that help bots understand what your website is about. This includes not only search engines, but also dictates how your website will look when shared on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Having the proper meta tags ensures that potential visitors get a good first impression of your website, even before they click through.

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HEY META is a pretty simple tool. All you need to do is enter your website’s URL, and it will automatically fetch your website’s title. From there, you just need to fill out your site’s description and preview image, and HEY META will generate the required meta tags. You can even see a preview of how your website will look when embedded on social media.

6. SEOptimer

The sixth and final website tool on this list, SEOptimer, is a combination of all the previous website tools mentioned. You enter your website’s URL, and SEOptimer will scan it for SEO (including backlinks), usability, performance, security, and social.

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This website tool gives you an overall website score, along with scores for each section. Each section gives you a detailed breakdown of why your website scored the way it did. This makes it easy to fix any issues found, which can help boost your website to rank higher on search engines. Additionally, the interface is modern and doesn’t look intimidating or cluttered.

Conclusion

Overall, each of these tools serves a specific purpose:

  • Dr. Link Check is a great tool to use to make sure all of your links function as expected.

  • OpenLinkProfiler is an excellent tool to keep tabs on your website’s backlinks, such as where they come from and their anchor texts.

  • WebPageTest is a good tool to have to ensure your website is performing as best as it can to give your users a good experience.

  • Mozilla Observatory is a handy tool that allows you to quickly and easily spot any security issues on your website.

  • HEY META is a unique tool for you to efficiently create the required meta tags to control how your website will look on social media platforms.

  • SEOptimer is a useful mix of all the previous tools; it checks your website’s SEO, performance, social, security, and usability all in one place.

The best part is that all of these tools are free to get started with, so you can try them all out and learn what works best for you.

 
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