Check Website Quality Reports for Free

When you’re looking to manage a successful website, you know to check website quality regularly to ensure the success of a project. There are a whole host of amazing tools available for people with large budgets, but there are also free tools.

Here are some of my favorite ways to check website quality without spending a dime.

Check website quality for structural errors

If you’re looking to test your website for technical and structural errors, there’s nothing better than the W3C’s free online validator service.

The validator will run your webpage against standardization tests to ensure that the HTML code meets modern standards.

You can also view the results effectively across most devices.

In addition to the standard tester, there are also special tests for:

• validating feeds;
• testing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS);
• mobile browsers;
• a link tester;

In my experience, passing these basic tests in the first step to developing a search engine friendly website. By checking the website quality for errors at a basic code level, you’re ensuring that the website is compatible with search engines optimization as well as any browsers designed to meet global standards.

Website design quality check

Presuming that your website writes good quality HTML, you’ll also want to ensure that it looks great and that’s where Browser Shots comes in handy. This free web service is a little advertisement heavy but allows website designers to quickly check website quality across multiple browsers and operating systems.

The website quality check performed by Browser shots is a fairly accurate indication of how a website will appear in a multitude of browsers and helps designers check website quality for glaring errors in a single batch.

Accessibility check for quality

Although it has a fairly limited free version, the tool at accessibility report at http://try.powermapper.com/ is a great place for web designers to check website quality for common accessibility errors, as well as a host of other free tests such as:

• basic HMTL errors;
• accessibility for impaired users;
• browser compatibility issues;
• helps identify privacy matters;
• improved search reports;
• outlines web standards;
• lists usability concerns;

Use Pingdom Tools to check for website quality

One of my favorite ways to check website quality is with Pingdom Tools free online quality checker. It runs a website through its paces, running performance tests that should make most IT departments envious.

The reporting tools include a beautifully functional waterfall display. The breakdown includes what files are being loaded, as well as the order.

The results are formatted into easy to understand graphics. With a breakdown to indicate each stage of the load process. This helps designers check website quality against load balancing.

For example, I’m able to see several CSS and JS files that I don’t need to load and remove them to improve load times.

Check website quality for SEO

Search engine optimization is, of course, the goal of many website owners, and there are a couple of great tools designed to help meet Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The first is SEO Worker’s free tool for reporting on a webpage performance. What I like best is that it includes video links from Google explaining why certain practices are best.

The second tool that I use to check website quality for SEO purposes is the Google Search Console Webmaster suite, another free tool by Google that is designed to help website owners improve how Google sees their website, and improve the data Google includes in their search engine result pages.

Conclusion

There are lots of powerful free tools for web designers to use. If I’ve missed any that you think should be listed, please let me know in the comments below.