Website Checking

Tips to improve your website

Our website (the one you’re reading now!) came from a strange background. Much of the content started on my blog (hosted at WordPress.com) which was transferred to our own hosting. The result could be better.

Updated December 7th 2011

There are a number of tools worth looking at.

I was prompted to check out PageTrawler(Alpha) which, somehow, didn’t like our site – previously. The updated version produces some very easy to use results, which you can then download.

 

HubSpot provide a neat tool with WebSite Grader . Simply enter your website address and enjoy their crazy prompts as their systems evaluate your site.

HubSpot are a commecial company and take the opportunities to promote their products/webinars within the report. Personally, I see this as a good thing – they have a commercial model and should still be around tomorrow.

The full report for our website as shown by WebSite Grader can be seen here and will be live. It’s interesting to compare the live  results against the snapshot from August 2011 (below). These tools really can help. 

HubSpot are continually upgrading their tools and adding new checks. I find it worthwhile to check my site against Grader every few weeks.

This snippet from the report gives a flavour of the information – here we can see that the site rates pretty well, but recent articles haven’t been re-tweeted.

 

Yslow is a powerful add-in  which lets you know how well your pages are loading and gives you some useful pointers. (The link takes you directly to the Google Chrome addin page – see the yahoo developers page for other information).

Access the yslow for chrome add-in link from within Chrome browser and select the ‘Add to Chrome’ option

You’’ll now notice an extra option on Chrome at the top right hand corner of the screen

The icon alongside the spanner (that’s what we English folks call a wrench) is the yslow application.

To use yslow, simply navigate to a webpage and click the yslow logo. The yslow page appears at the bottom of the screen and offers you the option to ‘run the test’. Let the test run then check out the results. (I won’t pretend to know what it all means.)

Here’s part of the report for our own website, and it’s given me some pointers to work with. In reality, I’m quite happy with the result (at present) as we have a fairly graphical website and the images – which slow down the speed – do add a great deal to the readability.

(many thanks to @mattmoo2 for pointing this out on Twitter recently).

 

Looking into your site in more detail requires tools like Xenu LinkSleuth

This is a free piece of software (the author asks for donations to charity and other great ideas) and is aimed at Windows based PCs. When the package runs there is an empty screen – simply select file then ‘Check URL’.

In the screen that appears enter the URL of the web site you’d like to check

 

There are various options you can set, as a first check make sure to click the ‘check external links’ - this is when I discovered just how many times I’d made reference to Becta web sites! Then click OK

As the check runs through, it will show something like this – the ‘busy’ means that the check is currently in progress.

Whilst the site is being analysed, there is a counter in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

When finished, the screen shows -

If you click No at this point, the display stays in place (you don’t lose the work) and you can quickly find broken links.

Click on ‘status’ near the top of the screen, which re-orders the display based on status. This way you can quickly find the broken links.

Three broken links in a site of 2015 links is still three too many!

By clicking File>Export to tab separated files you can generate a file which you can later analyse in a spread sheet package.

If you do want a very detailed report either select Yes to the ‘Do You Want a Report’ prompt (above) or select File Report. This report requires you to have admin / login access to the site where your website is hosted – not recommended for non-technical and non-administrative users

 

Did you find this useful, and are there any similar tools which you use?