Best Website Optimisation Tools

S

Smith_euk

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Website optimization is the process of improving your web pages to increase performance in terms of speed, search engine rankings, conversions, UX (user experience), and accessibility.
Here I have listed some of the most useful tools:
  • PageSpeed Insights
  • Google Search Console (GSC)
  • Screaming Frog
  • Google Optimize
  • GTMetrix
  • WAVE
 
Smith_euk said:
  • WAVE
Click to expand...
What is WAVE?

The other tools listed are great at providing an overview list of areas for improvement. Yoast and RankMath (SEO Plugins for WordPress) are also great at giving some base information to users.

GTMetrix is good for reviewing files being pulled, but unless you have a paid account, all requests are pulled from Vancouver Canada, so page response times can be severely misleading. Pingdom is a good alternative.

For ultimate info, just use Chrome, load your website, then inspect element (Control+Shift/Command+Shift I), and check out both the Network and Performance tabs. "Lighthouse", which is also in the Inspect Element area has the best real-time report of your website from YOUR location.

But, I'm curious what WAVE is.
 
One of my favourite tools for checking site speed and seeing anything obvious that is a major slowdown issue is Fast or Slow - https://www.fastorslow.com/

It tests from multiple geographic locations at once and it's always interesting to see just how much slower our European hosted sites are in Australia!
 
I just played around with WAVE and found it very interesting. Apparently, they don't like white text on any color background.
 
SenseiSteve said:
I just played around with WAVE and found it very interesting. Apparently, they don't like white text on any color background.
Click to expand...
Yeah, they are a bit extreme about colour contrasts I think.

It's a great tool but like anything that gives you a score or tells you that you have errors that should be fixed it's very easy to go down a rabbit hole.
 
Popular UX optimization tools:

Hotjar
Fullstory
UserTesting
TryMyUI
UsabilityHub

Popular mobile optimization tools:

Hotjar
Mobile-Friendly Test
PageSpeed Insights
Google Search Console
Google Analytics
WebPageTest

Popular CRO tools:

Google Analytics
Hotjar
Google Optimize
Matomo
VWO
Crazy Egg
Optimizely
 
I'm uisng the Google Search Console (GSC) tool, This tool sugget in deapth site issues about the website speed in page experience section.
 
If you're using Wordpress there are two essential plugins I personally use; Google Site Kit and Yoast Seo. There are many others, but this combination works best for me. Also, make sure you're using Litespeed with teh Litespeed cache plugin and have Object cache enabled.
 
SenseiSteve said:
Since you like Yoast SEO, you might give RathMath a try too.
Click to expand...
Did you mean Rank Math Steve? I took a look at it and it does look impressive but I am not in a position to pay $59 a year for all the features. Yoast has a premium option as well but a lot of the features are free which speaks to me at the moment lol
 
You know these tools
We use it for analyzing various aspects:
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Lighthouse - a great tool by Google itself.
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GA 4 - can tell you where your website is having issues.
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Hotjar - hate that it slows down the website but video feedback is invaluable.
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Page speed insights - If you have enough visitors you also get past 28 days of data on load times.
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Keyword planner on Google Ads to get search volumes.
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Website Auditor - SEO power suite (fantastic tool if you want to see all kinds of insights about your website. The best is the way that it takes all the content of the top ten sites and makes a summary of your website and theirs.

Listing all the word topics and how often they are used with TDF- iF.

We use this in place of yoast and rankmaths writing suggestions (don't know if better for sure)
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Screaming Frog is also another nice tool to audit your website in general This one we specifically use for looking at linking structures and incoming and outbound links.


All tools here except for Google ads are free and have a pretty nice free version.
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We also have state messaging around with Chat GPT like I'm sure most people have. Though I find it still neds a lot of human changes to the stuff it writes. it's good for concepts if you have the right prompts.
 
romes said:
Did you mean Rank Math Steve? I took a look at it and it does look impressive but I am not in a position to pay $59 a year for all the features. Yoast has a premium option as well but a lot of the features are free which speaks to me at the moment lol
Click to expand...
Rank Math's free version does much more than Yoasts free version. We LOVE the pro version of Rank Math but the free version is a requirement on all projects we work on for our SEO Clients.
 
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