No website is perfect, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to make the best websites possible.
Unfortunately, there are only so many things your brain can keep up with… SEO, accessibility, performance, design, best practices… The list goes on and on.
Though far from perfect, testing tools can be a great way to double check your work, find opportunities, and ensure you’re delivering the best product possible.
In this post you’ll find dozens of web-based testing tools to help you test your work.
Our Criteria
With thousands of tools on the market, I had to draw the line somewhere. Here’s a quick look at the criteria I used to build out the list:
- Must be browser-based. I doubt you want to download more software to your computer, so all of these tools are browser-based.
- No login required. There are some tools out there that offer free diagnostics, but you have to sign up to get them. Those didn’t make the list.
- Something useful for free. Many of these tools offer a premium (paid) option, but to make it on this list they had to do something useful for free.
- Tests quality / identifies issues. There are lots of tools like BuiltWith or DNS checkers that do scan your website, but they are just listing records, not testing anything — so for the purposes of this list they have not been included.
Note: Descriptions of each product were taken directly from the company and are not necessarily my personal opinion.
With that, lets go!
Accessibility Testing Tools
WAVE
Pricing Model: Free
WAVE® is a suite of evaluation tools that helps authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities.
WebFX Readability Test
Pricing Model: Free
Quick and easy way to test the readability of your work.
Browser Testing Tools
Screenfly
Pricing Model: Free
Test your website at different resolutions! Screenfly is here to show you how your website looks on any device.
Compliance
2GDPR
Pricing Model: Free
Free online tool to check website cookies for GDPR compliance and analyze webpages for SSL usage
CookieMetrix
Pricing Model: Freemium
CookieMetrix gives you insight about cookies installed from your website before the visitor’s consent.
Performance Testing Tools
Dareboost
Pricing Model: Freemium
All-in-one service for website speed test, web performance monitoring and website analysis (speed, SEO, quality, security). Web performance has never been so easy.
GTMetrix
Pricing Model: Freemium
GTmetrix has a suite of features and options to make optimizing your website clear and easy.
Page Speed Compare
Pricing Model: Free
Compare performance metrics of your pages against each other or your competitors using Google PageSpeed Insights.
PageSpeed Insights
Pricing Model: Free
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.
Pingdom
Pricing Model: Freemium
Use this free Website Speed Test to analyze the load speed of your websites, and learn how to make them faster.
SpeedVitals
Pricing Model: Free
Test your Website Speed and measure Web Vitals using SpeedVitals. Page Speed Testing from Multiple Locations & Devices.
WebPageTest
Pricing Model: Freemium
Run a free website speed test from around the globe using real browsers at consumer connection speeds with detailed optimization recommendations.
YellowLab
Pricing Model: Free
Yellow Lab Tools is a free online web performance analyzer. It audits a webpage for performance and front-end quality issues. And it’s open-source!
Security Testing Tools
Hardenize
Pricing Model: Freemium
Hardenize provides a comprehensive and free assessment of web site network and security configuration.
Pentest
Pricing Model: Freemium
Use the Online Website Vulnerability Scanner for a full web security check. Scan website: find SQLi, XSS, misconfings, CVEs and other vulnerabilities for FREE.
Sucuri
Pricing Model: Freemium
Check your website security for free with Sucuri Sitecheck. Sitecheck scans for malware, viruses, errors, blacklist status, and out-of-date software & plugins.
Security Headers
Pricing Model: Free
Quickly and easily assess the security of your HTTP response headers.
SSL Check
Pricing Model: Free
This free tool will crawl an HTTPS-website (entire website, recursively, following internal links) and search for non-secure images, scripts and css-files that will trigger a “mixed content” warning message in browsers.
VirusTotal
Pricing Model: Free
Analyze suspicious files, domains, IPs and URLs to detect malware and other breaches, automatically share them with the security community.
SEO Testing Tools
Dead Link Checker
Pricing Model: Free
Want to find broken links on your website for free? Check out this quick, easy to use broken link checker tool & identify 404 pages in no time.
httpstatus
Pricing Model: Free
Redirect checker to easily check status codes, response headers, and redirect chains.
Moz Domain Analysis
Pricing Model: Freemium
Enter any domain, and we’ll show you top competitive SEO metrics like Domain Authority, top pages, ranking keywords, and more.
Neil Patel SEO Analyzer
Pricing Model: Freemium
Get a complete list of errors that are hindering your site from achieving the top spot on Google. This SEO audit prioritizes each fix based on potential traffic impact and ease of implementation. Once you make changes, you can re-run the report and check to see if you did it correctly.
Rich Results Test
Pricing Model: Free
The official Google tool for testing your structured data to see which Google rich results can be generated by the structured data on your page. You can also preview how rich results can look in Google Search.
Search Engine Simulator
Pricing Model: Free
The Search Engine Simulator tool shows you how the engines “see” a web page. It simulates how Google “reads” a webpage by displaying the content exactly how it would see it.
SEObility
Pricing Model: Freemium
Instantly review your website for free with the SEO checker from Seobility and get tips for a better search engine optimization and higher rankings.
SEOptimer
Pricing Model: Freemium
SEOptimer is the web’s best SEO Checker. Improve your website, rank better in Search Engines and win more customers with beautiful SEO Reports.
SEO Tester Online
Pricing Model: Freemium
Check your Website’s SEO & Generate Personalized Audit with our on page SEO Tester
Siteliner
Pricing Model: Free
Free and fast analysis of your entire website – duplicate content, broken links, internal page rank, redirections and more. Also creates an XML sitemap.
W3C Markup Validation
Pricing Model: Free
This validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc
Multi-Tools
KeyCDN Tools
Pricing Model: Free
Free web, network, and security tools to help troubleshoot website, network, and CDN issues for fast resolutions.
Nibbler
Pricing Model: Freemium
Free tool for testing how good your website is, and what you can do to improve it. Check accessibility, SEO, social media, compliance and more.
Uptrends
Pricing Model: Freemium
Our free website monitoring tools get you hands-on data about your website uptime and performance. Test your website from different perspectives.
Web.dev
Pricing Model: Free
Test your pages in a lab environment powered by PageSpeed Insights. Then get tips and recommendations to improve your user experience.
Wrapping Up
I hope you’ve found a few new tools to help improve your projects — but I’m sure that I’ve missed plenty of good ones! If you know of a tool that belongs on this list, please submit it and I’ll get it added!
A huge thank you to all the folks in The Admin Bar Community who suggested lots of the tools included on this list. If you’re looking for a great place to hang out with other WordPress professionals, come join us!
Kyle Van Deusen
After spending 15 years as a graphic designer and earning a business degree, I launched my agency, OGAL Web Design, in 2017. A year later, after finding the amazing community around WordPress, I co-found The Admin Bar, which has grown to become the #1 community for WordPress professionals. I'm a husband and proud father of three, and a new resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
