Even more ways to optimize your website

In a recent post, we discussed how you shouldn’t fixate on just doing marketing, but you should also constantly optimize your website. In this article, we’ll give you a few more methods to apply when assessing your web code in various respects.

The first big tools to consider are the HTML and the CSS validators maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):

• https://validator.w3.org – this checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc.
• https://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ – this checks CSS, but it’s recommended to always fix your HTML first

Some other less important tools that they offer:

• https://validator.w3.org/feed/ – it checks Atom and RSS feeds
• https://validator.w3.org/nu/ – a newer HTML5 checker that they’re working on
• https://validator.w3.org/unicorn/ – a unified checker that runs the two above + CSS
• for future reference, here’s a list of all their checking tools and all their repositories

Their tools could probably keep your web developer busy for two months fixing things. That’s if you’re running your website on a WordPress CMS with a custom theme that you’ve purchased. If your website is built from the ground up, repairing issues will probably take a lot less time – a matter of days.

Here are some more tools that you could use:

• https://www.webpagetest.org and https://www.giftofspeed.com – speed testing platforms that we haven’t mentioned in the first article; the ones that we mentioned should be more than enough, but some web developers prefer these two
• Chrome browser’s Developer Tools – in the hands of a good developer, these are gold; for a businessman who just pays a developer for maintenance and improvements, it won’t be much use
• https://validator.ampproject.org/ – if your website uses the open-source HTML framework named “AMP”, then you need to validate with this tool as well; AMP is optimised for mobile web browsing and intended to help webpages load faster
• https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ and https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator – you use these tools to see if the pages of your website look good in the posts where they are mentioned on social media; this depends on how well they implement the Open Graph protocol
• https://www.uptrends.com/tools/uptime – check if your website is available worldwide
• https://achecker.ca/checker/index.php – check conformance with accessibility standards to ensure that the content can be accessed by everyone; more such tools in this list, but they won’t be better: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/

Less useful tools (usually because what they’re doing is done better by one of the above):

• http://browsershots.org – makes screenshots of your web design in different operating systems and browsers
• https://website.grader.com
• https://nibbler.silktide.com
• https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

We’ll stop here because we fear that we might have given you too many interesting activities to do, and because of it, you’ll end up using our own website less. Hopefully, one year from now this article ends up buried on our blog under content with more interesting titles. They’ll probably help you less, but at least you won’t leave our website. You might even end up bookmarking it, for when you need marketing services in the future. Thank you for reading!