The right tools to test the performance of your website

At PlanetHoster, our technicians today have created a list of 15 tools to use to verify the overall performance of your website. These systems allow you at any time to do a test for free and without installing software on your computer.

These will give you a guideline for good practice to follow in order to have an optimal site at any point of view.

PERFORMANCE :

This is no longer a secret, search engines take to heart the speed of your website. Crawlers now like to note the performance of your website vis-à-vis certain criteria that the tools below will help you identify.

GTmetrix is one of my favorite tools to test the proper function of your site, it will let you do performance testing from different access points in the world (for those registered). This site is based on Google’s systems (Page Speed) and Yahoo (YSlow) to give you good recommendations. It is also possible to have a time line to see resources taking the time to load or returning codes 301 or 404.

Pingdom is a great monitoring system, it permits you to have a full report for free with a timeline, and the weight of different types of content. It also allows to check the configuration of your DNS zone of a domain-level DNSsec, to ping and do tracert.

Many clients ask us to check if they’re hosting service will bear the load of heavy traffic in busy times like in commercial spots, Adword campaigns… Load Impact free version will allow you to test your hosting with a load of 25 simultaneous active visitors over a period of 5 minutes. This will let you check if your hosting is calibrated to the number of visitors you expect.

The last system is used to check, from nearly 135 access points worldwide, the performance and availability of your site, it helps to have a quick view on the interconnections that your host has worldwide.

SEO:

All webmasters and site owners want to be in the top results of search engines and directories, there are also practices to best optimize your pages for the main data out well.

WooRank is a tool that lets you make free audits to verify that you are using different standards such as robots.txt, sitemap, title, meta description … For each element analysis, you will find recommendations to make it easy to correct.

DareBoost is similar to Woorank system, however, it will allow you to do more daily performance data audit by subscribing.

When writing pages, we very often attract a target audience who may not be using the same words as you. So it is good to use a keyword generator that allows you to expand your field of vision on the canvas. Übersuggest is based, in fact, on the Google Auto Suggest algorithm namely.

RANKING:

When buying a new domain or perhaps the domain of an existing business, you will be taken to check the popularity or the seniority of it.

AlexaRank is a California company that provides statistics on the domains you want, it can, for example, to see the classification of the domain at world level or country, or of similar websites and sites with links returns thereon.

PageRank is a rating system that assigns a score between 0-10, this system is less used but allows you to have visibility on the seniority of the domain.

SSL:

The SSL certificate is a very good thing for merchant sites or webmaster wishing to encrypt content. However, during the installation of it, some people have difficulties because the browser indicates that the connection is not secure! Why ?

“Why No Padlock?” Is a tool that will allow you to see what the problem, often it is not loaded with HTTPS resources, expired certificate, unsupported SSL … There is also another similar site like SSLlabs et SSLcheck.

MAIL/RePUTATION:

Nothing worse than rejected mail (Mail delivery failed: returning the message to sender), the message bounce-back allows you to diagnose the source of the problem, however, this one is not easy to understand for a non-technical person. There are tools online allowing you to check the desirability of your emails.

Mail-Tester is a very nice tool that will allow you to check a number of rules such as SPF, DKIM, the RDNS that is used by systems like SpamAssassin. The higher the score, the higher it ensures your mailing list / newsletter will not fall into the unwanted message box.

SenderBase is a service developed by Cisco to verify the Web reputation and Email your IP / Host. It is very interesting to use this tool to ensure that your web host does not neglect these IP ranges and if it has a good reputation.

MxToolbox has been designed to quickly check the operation of an email server and check if the IP is not blacklisted at RBL.

DNS/WHOIS:

Our last two services are in relation to the domain name and management of the DNS zone.

When registering a domain name, the host sends the domain owner information to a Naming body to inform it as the legal owner. Some unscrupulous hosts buy domain names with their names, in this instance, the domain does not belong to the client, but to the host. It is highly recommended to check that your information on the domain WHOIS is correct. In the case of domains like. fr having been registered as individuals, the WHOIS information is hidden for privacy reasons.

IntoDNS allows you to verify if the proper standards in DNS zone management are well respected, it will indicate the used name servers, email servers receiving (MX), SOA, … It is very useful for systems administrators wanting to do things right.

If you have other free online tools to recommend without installation, you can add them in the comments section below.

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