Top 5 FREE Website Tools for Small Businesses
Clay Kraby, Marketing Specialist
Even the smallest of small businesses are typically aware of the benefits of being online. Having a well-designed website allows your customers and potential customers to learn more about your products and services and serves as a communications hub for furthering your brand.
But what comes after your domain name has been purchased, your website created, and your site hosted online? Maintenance. Websites need to be monitored and maintained to ensure that they continue to be effective in reaching your audience. Search engine optimization, design, navigation, and analyzing visitor’s interactions with your site are all important considerations. Here are five tools to help make these tasks quicker, easier, and more enjoyable without costing you a dime:
Website Grader
Hubspot’s www.websitegrader.com scores your websites search engine optimization (SEO) effectiveness. You just type in your site’s URL and make one click to generate a detailed report which will detail any SEO issues you have, evaluate your blog and social media activity, and tell you how to make improvements.
Firebug
This Firefox extension allows you to inspect a pages HTML code and test modifications in real time. Although the changes you make won’t actually take effect on the live website, this tool can help you test style changes and track down finicky lines of code.
You can inspect elements of your website by clicking directly on them, or search for a specific snippet of code and go from there. Firebug is an extremely powerful tool that is quick to launch, easy to use, and immensely valuable in creating and maintaining your website.
YSlow
A great addition to the above Firebug extension, Yahoo’s YSlow is available for Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. When activated, YSlow will analyze your websites performance and offer recommendations on how to make your page load faster and more efficiently.
YSlow offers easy to understand letter grades for many components of your site’s performance as well as detailed information on how to make improvements.
Google Analytics
By far the most important and most powerful website analysis available, Google Analytics gives you extremely detailed information on your websites performance as well as demographic information on visitors, a list of traffic sources and keywords, and an evaluation of the popularity of your content.
Being able to see which of your pages are gaining new visitors, which pages receive few views, and where the majority of your traffic comes can help you make important changes to your site’s content. Additionally you can learn where your visitors are from and what browsers they use to access your content. Learn how to read your Google Analytics report.
Yoast SEO plugin (for WordPress websites)
One of best qualities of WordPress is its ability to add helpful plugins. The Yoast SEO plugin is by far the most important, and is the first plugin installed on every website I create. This tool allows you to quickly and easily add meta data, Google Analytics tracking code, automatically generate sitemaps, edit your robots file, and so much more. This plugin is loaded with features, is extremely user friendly, and very effective. See a more detailed analysis of Yoast SEO.
