12 free tools for website optimisation

After developing my ADS-B trackers and the central database of aircraft, I wanted to share the results to the world. What’s better than having my own website for this? Let me share these 12 tools for website optimisation that I use periodically. There are few directions which are important for website optimisation: make sure your website is known by the main search engines, make sure your SEO meta data is right, make sure your website load fast enough and solve all your technical issues.

Website Optimisation for SEO

Browseo
Browseo is a great free tool to make all the SEO data visible. It will show the title, meta tags, and other invisible data that are key for SEO just to make sure you got them right. At first, I didn’t see what it was useful for, because I was just checking my main index page, but when I used it to test my php pages, with dynamic meta tags, that was super useful to see what’s wrong with those tags!

Seositecheckup
Seositecheckup is a great free tool to analyse all the SEO data of your website and highlight what is missing. The free version can only scan your website once a day, but that let’s you some time to solve all the issues before checking them again.

Brokenlinkcheck
Broken links are impacting your SEO ranking, but are hard to find. Brokenlinkcheck will find them for you. Free for 2000 links. If you are using WordPress there are some dedicated plugins for this.

Make sure you are known to main search engines

Bing, Google, Yandex are the one to start with. Create an account, give them your URL and they will start to crawl your website. Check the result of those crawls regularly as they will report errors. Browseo (see above) is a great tool to understand canonical url issues. Regarding sitemaps, there are 2 philosophy: let them discover your site by themselves or use a very detailed one. I went with the first one and only put the main pages in my sitemap.

Website Optimisation for Speed

gtmetrix and Google Pagespeed Insight are two great free tools to understand what is making your website slow to load. Solving the issues requires some technical knowledge, but some tricks are very useful: optimise your images and videos, use a CDN, use Gzip compression and optimize PHP code.

Solve technical issues

Dnschecker
Have you recently switched web host or started a new website, then you are in the right place! DNS Checker provides free DNS lookup service for checking domain name server records against a randomly selected list of DNS servers in different corners of the world. Do a quick DNS propagation lookup for any domain name and check DNS data collected from all location for confirming that the website is completely propagated or not worldwide.

Immuniweb
Website security testing (GDPR compliance, CSH and HTTP headers check, common Javascript libraries version check…). Make sure you have all the security basics right!

Onlineconverter
A free tool to convert any image into the format you need for your website.

DownNotifier
A free tool to check if your website is offline.

Have fun optimising your website with those free tools!