Grow Your Website With These 30 Optimization Tools
Constantly optimizing your site is critical to sustaining long-term growth. In the fight for visitors and conversions one of your most valuable weapons is the ability to continually create new and better versions of your site as user expectations (and the competitive landscape) change.
Consider that you have brought your site take it to the next level You've already done the hard work of building your site and now it's time to optimize what you already have to stay ahead of the competition and achieve iterative growth.
Whether you're just getting started on your optimization journey or looking to level up this guide will show you 30+ of the best website optimization tools as well as two additional tips you may not have even thought about.
What is website optimization?
Website optimization describes the process of analyzing the user experience (UX) accessibility and search performance of your site and making changes to increase traffic or conversions.
Website optimization involves the use of various tools and strategies including search engine optimization (SEO) conversion rate optimization (CRO) mobile browsing optimization page speed improvement and more.
Top 7 Free Website Optimization Tools That Will Work in 2022 (and Beyond)
PageSpeed Insights
What it is: Created by Google PageSpeed Insights is a simple and free website speed test tool.
What you can optimize: Site page speed desktop site performance and mobile page speed.
How to use: Enter any URL and click "Analyze". PageSpeed Insights will give you a page speed score out of 100 and suggest how you can make your site load faster.
Hotjar
What it is: Hotjar is a behavior analysis software that measures the interaction and feedback of website visitors.
What you can optimize: find and fix bugs, optimize page design for higher conversions and improve UX.
How to use it: Sign up add the Hotjar tracking code to your website and you will automatically start recording sessions and generating heatmaps.
Don't forget to set up a survey on the site to collect direct user feedback. Hotjar is free for 35 sessions per day and 3 surveys.
Google Search Console (GSC)
What it is: Search Console is a free search engine optimization tool from Google.
What you can optimize: Measure SEO performance view keyword impressions and clicks, view backlinks and check for crawl and speed errors.
How to use: Sign in with your Google account, verify the site ownership and wait for the data to be collected.
Screaming Frog
What it is: Screaming Frog is a website crawling software for PC, Mac or Linux.
What you can optimize: page optimization and technical SEO - finding broken links checking HTML and XML sitemaps finding duplicate content, checking redirects and analyzing page titles and meta descriptions.
How to use: Download Screaming Frog and enter a URL or sitemap to start crawling. Screaming Frog is free for 500 URL.
Google Optimize
What it is: Google Optimize is a free website experimentation platform that integrates with Google Analytics.
What you can optimize: Use A/B testing, split testing and multivariate testing (MVT) to test variations on different web pages and measure their performance.
How to use: sign up for Google Optimize with your Google account add the tag to your site install the extension chrome and run a new test after creating page variations.
Did you know? Hotjar integrates with Google Optimize and automatically detects when visitors are in an Optimize experiment. You can filter Hotjar session records by Optimize Experiment ID and see how visitors view, click and scroll through each test page.
GTmetrix
What it is: GTMetrix is a tool for measuring web page loading speed.
What you can optimize: page loading speed.
How to use: Enter any URL and click "Test Your Site" for a basic speed test. Click on the dropdown for each recommendation to learn how to make the page load faster.
WAVE
What it is: WAVE is a website accessibility assessment tool.
What you can optimize: Find accessibility issues such as missing alt text small text size and contrast errors that make your content inaccessible to screen readers.
How to use: Enter any URL and click on the errors marked with icons to see what needs to be changed and learn why improving accessibility is important.
Now you know that you don't have to spend money to start optimizing your site you can start playing with one or more of the tools we just covered.
But if you want to dig deeper into optimizing a specific area of your site-like speeding up your landing page or finding a new keyword for a blog post-here's an overview of the different types of web optimization you can focus on as well as the tools to help you accomplish it this job.
6 types of website optimization tools
Website optimization is a big topic but the tools you can use fall into six main categories:
- Page speed
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- User Experience (UX)
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Mobile-Oriented
- Availability
Some tools help you work on multiple areas at once-Hotjar for example can be used to improve UX and conversion rates on desktop and mobile-but in general you will need to use multiple tools to optimize your entire site.
Think of it as one big optimization ecosystem: if you improve site speed you will also help your SEO & UX & CRO efforts.
If your mindset is to make your site better you'll benefit greatly from the tools we'll cover below.
Web page speed tools
A slow site can repel users and lower search rankings. Web page speed tools won't fix your slow site by themselves but they will measure your page speed and show you what's slowing it down. You will be able to pinpoint exactly how to improve page load times by following guidelines such as:
- Minify and compress HTML &CSS & JavaScript & images
- Content caching
- Using faster-hosting servers
Do you want to make your website faster? We partnered with the HubSpot Academy for a free website optimization course. You will learn how to make your site faster to keep more visitors.
Popular Website Speed Optimization Tools
- PageSpeed Insights
- GTmetrix
- Pingdom
- WebPageTest
- lighthouse
Are you using WordPress? Speed up your site with these popular optimization plugins:
- WP SuperCache
- Autoptimize
- Smush Image Optimization
SEO tools
SEO (search engine optimization) can help you get more free traffic to your website from search engines like Google and Bing.
There are many different types of SEO tools to help you optimize everything from the structure of your web pages to track how you rank for certain keywords:
- Technical SEO tools for auditing on-page SEO (for example, checking meta robots tags or 404 links).
- Keyword research tools to find keyword ideas
- Rank tracking tools to measure and compare search traffic and determine your site SERP placement for targeted keywords.
- Content optimization tools to optimize for targeted keywords
- Backlink analysis tools to check which pages link to your site (or competitors)
- Video SEO tools to optimize your videos to rank highly on sites like YouTube.
You can use specialized SEO tools that do just one thing (like Screaming Frog is a specialized tool for technical SEO) or all-in-one SEO tools like Ahrefs that do a little bit of everything. Popular SEO Tools :
- Google Search Console
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Ahrefs
- Moz
- SEMrush
- Screaming Frog
- clear scope
Are you using WordPress? Optimize your WordPress site with these popular SEO plugins:
- Yoast SEO
- All-in-One SEO Pack
- RankMath
- SEOPress
UX optimization tools
A great UX (user experience) will delight visitors and reduce friction on your site which will ultimately lead to higher conversions and more revenue.
UX optimization tools won't magically improve user experience but usability testing will help you understand user behavior and diagnose problems so you can optimize your pages and give people what they need to keep browsing and buying on your site.
From identifying where users get stuck to conducting user research UX tools help every step of the page optimization journey.
Popular UX optimization tools:
- Hotjar
- full story
- User Testing
- TryMyUI
- UsabilityHub
CRO Tools
Done right CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) allows you to increase the number of site visitors who become customers (or take any desired action on your site).
There is no single tool that will improve your conversion rate but a combination of the following tools:
- Traditional analytics (tools such as Google Analytics)
- Behavioral analytics software (tools such as heat maps, session recordings and on-site surveys )
- Testing tools (for example Google Optimize)
You'll get a complete picture of what's happening on your site and you'll be able to give people what they need to convert Popular CRO tools :
- Google Analytics
- Hotjar
- Google Optimize
- Matomo
- VWO
- Crazy Egg
- Optimizely
mobile optimization tools
More people are browsing websites on mobile devices than on desktops so optimizing for mobile devices will help you ensure that your site displays correctly on phones and tablets.
Web elements such as pop-ups image-heavy pages and small text can make the site difficult to navigate on mobile devices.
Of course generalizations are not always useful check the analytics data to see what percentage of your users and customers are browsing on mobile devices to know how important mobile optimization is for your business.
If you use Google Analytics for example use the Audience > Mobile > Overview report:
Popular mobile optimization tools:
- Hotjar
- Mobile-friendliness test
- PageSpeed Insights
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- WebPageTest
accessibility tools
An accessible website is user-friendly for everyone which is a win for you and your visitors: great UX for them and more happy customers for you.
Accessibility tools can show you how your landing pages look on a reader screen or for people with different disabilities (such as different types of color blindness) and provide optimization suggestions to make your site more inclusive Popular accessibility optimization tools:
- WAVE
- Check My Colors
- Equal Web
- Functional Accessibility Evaluator
The inclusive design doesn't mean designing one thing for all people it's designing a variety of ways to participate so everyone has a sense of belonging.
By working with people with different views including them and learning from them you can capture a large share of the consumer market. Ilana Davis & Shopify & Consultant square space.
2 Basic Website Optimization Strategies That Always Work
So far, we have listed 30+ website optimization tools that you can use right now to increase your website traffic and revenue.
And there are thousands more. So where do you start? This may surprise you but not from the instrument at all.
While you and your competitors have access to the same optimization tools there is one thing that is unique to you: your customers and the way they behave on your site.
When you start with the goal of understanding your customers their needs and why they came to your site in the first place the tool(s) you choose to improve your site is only a means to an end: to provide your customers with that the experience they deserve.
Observe real user behavior with session recordings
Even if you have the fastest site on the planet and rank highly for your target keywords no amount of speed or search engine optimization “best practices” can help you understand what users are doing on your site or how they perceive your pages.
Session recordings come in handy to help you understand what individual users are experiencing on your site. Using recordings you can see how real people get stuck move through your funnel and do what they do just before converting or leaving.
You'll witness frustrated furious clicks be able to spot and fix site errors and get a clear idea of what needs to be optimized on your site. Bring your popcorn!
How can visitor records help grow my business? Here are 4 examples of how real companies have used posts to increase conversions and signups detect bugs and optimize for mobile devices.
Obtaining information from users using surveys and feedback widgets
There is one extremely valuable optimization resource that only you have access to your customers. You can get feedback from customers and users in a variety of ways including:
Surveys on the site
Offsite Surveys: Send a survey invitation link to your email subscribers or customer list so they can respond at their convenience.
Review Widgets: Users can express their love (or hate) to your page as well as click on any element to add a comment about it.
