Tools to check your site’s health

Perishable Press is now over 12 years old. It is a lot of work keeping everything updated, maintained, and well-secured. Fortunately there are a gazillion free online tools for checking your site’s health. Everyone has their favorites. In this quick article, I share mine.

Check Site Security

Security is priority numero uno. And while there are plenty of online scanners to check your site’s security, I wouldn’t rely solely on any/all of them. Security is much more complex than can be tested with a simple online scan. That said, here are some useful tools for getting a general idea about the overall level of your site’s security.

• Mozilla Security Scanner
• Malware and Security Scanner
• SSL Server Test

Check Site Performance

Performance obviously is another super important factor for your site’s success. There are many ways to measure performance, including online tools, browser extensions, 3rd-party scripts, and so forth. So you can really dive in as deep as you want and optimize every little detail as desired. To get started, here are some helpful tools for checking the performance of your web pages.

• GTmetrix.com
• Pingdom.com
• Google Pagespeed
• KeyCDN Tools

Check Site SEO

Another important aspect of your sites is SEO. The degree to which your site is optimized for search engines can play a major role in determining the ongoing success or failure of your site. Fortunately, there are scads of “free” online tools for checking your site’s SEO; unfortunately most of them are absolute crap. Here are some decent tools that I’ve found that don’t require registration, don’t push any aggressive marketing tactics, and generally provide realistic, useful SEO-related information.

• Silktide Site Analyzer
• SEO Audit & Reporting

Check Other Details

Beyond security, performance, and SEO, there are myriad other details that should be checked, monitored, improved, etc. Here are some useful tools for things like checking your email address against known blacklists, checking pages for broken links, and more.

• Check Email Blacklists
• Check Broken Links (brokenlinkcheck.com)
• Check Broken Links (deadlinkchecker.com)
• Check Broken Links (w3.org)

Additionally, here are some collections of free online tools, services, and so forth — all great for site management and working online in general.

• My collection of tools for developers
• My collection of tools for designers
• More awesome free tools

What did I miss? Let me know in the comments below, thanks!

About the Author

Jeff Starr = Web Developer. Book Author. Secretly Important.