5 Useful (And Free) Tools To Analyse Your Website

I've found these tools to be very useful in analysing and optimizing websites. I'll start with my favorite:

1. websiteoptimization.com

From the website: Website Performance Tool And Web Page Speed Analysis. This site analyses a url and gives a web page speed report. You can use it to determine page load times and drill down to page objects that slow down load times.

Pay close attention to the recommendations at the end of the report. For example if the total number of images exceed a certain size, the report will point this out to you. Best of all, the recommendations are in a easy-to-understand language and I found them very practical.

2. sitescore

From the website: Sitescore is a free tool which rates how well designed, popular and accessible your website is. And that's what this nifty site tool does.

sitescore assigns a score to your website on the following criteria:

Marketing, Design, Accessibility, Experience and Visitor Rating. It also provides an overall score. It gives a summary of the good and bad points of your site and a detailed breakdown of what it means and suggestions for improving.

3. smartpagerank.com

From the website: The Easy Way To Check And Monitor Your Page Rank. As the site name suggests, this tool is more focussed on the pagerank. It does offer other interesting details on the site that's being checked like a cute thumbnail of the page, number of backlinks (links pointing to your site), alexa rank, number of pages indexed by search engine etc. One interesting tidbit this site offers is the value of your website in US dollars! I don't know how it calculates it, but I thought that was pretty interesting!

4. webwait.com

From the website:WebWait is a website where you can measure the speed of other websites. It times precisely how long the website takes to load and render in your browser, including any images, stylesheets, and Javascript.

Webwait has a neat interface and measures the speed of a website. The tests are more complex than your average speed rating sites. Webwait makes multiple passes and takes into account cookies, images, CSS and javascripts.

5. smallbusinesshub.com

This site, among other things, has a neat web grading tool. The site is a little slow, but the wait is worth it. The tool grades your site and provides ranking from various sources like Google, Technorati, Alexa and Delicious. Recommendations are provided in areas that need improvement. Overall, an excellent resource to check your website or blog.

All of the above sites provide a useful service without overwhelming a user with ads and popups. I think that is worth a mention!

UPDATE: If you liked this article, do check out Practical Tips For Selecting A Color Scheme For Your Website (Six Tools To Help You Do Just That!) and 15 Tips That Could Save You Money On Your Next Mac purchase