While it’s great that the internet makes it so easy to access information from anywhere on any device, it also means that website owners and developers must be diligent in making sure that their sites work well for every potential visitor.

Testing your website on a wide variety of devices manually is unrealistic, of course, but knowing that it will work securely and quickly for everyone who tries to use it is a top priority. Users might find links you didn’t know were dead, hackers could spot vulnerabilities in your web app and ruin your reputation, your website could drop off the first page of Google, or your site might be super slow in another country.

That’s where these free health check, performance analysis, dead link finding, security test, and SEO suggestion services come in: helping you stay on top of your website’s health around the clock for free.

GTmetrix:

Test your website’s performance get recommendations to make it faster.

You might think your website is loading fast when you test it at home, but your customers in a different part of the world could find it unbearably slow. GTmetrix lets you test your website from a location, browser, and connection type of your choosing so that you can get a feel for how fast it is for someone else.

Then, the service will score your site’s performance and give you specific recommendations for how to improve it. You can also get screenshots of what your website looks like on a variety of device screen sizes to perfect your responsive design.

Dr. Link Check:

Pinpoint broken and malicious links on your site.

As pages are updated and domains change hands, links to other places on the Web from your site will frequently become dead and require updating. Worse, a domain could be bought and set to redirect to a phishing site, giving your users a nasty surprise. Dr. Link Check alleviates you from having to periodically click every link on your site to check that it’s working.

It doesn’t just make sure that the page you linked to loads; it also checks to verify that the site isn’t on a malware or phishing blocklist, the certificate hasn’t expired, the user won’t get a 404 or 500 error, and the domain hasn’t been parked and filled with ads. Every link on every page of your site is thoroughly tested and the results can be searched, filtered, and downloaded into Excel or another program of your choosing.

Website Vulnerability Scanner:

Find security bugs before hackers do.

There are so many ways to subtly slip up when developing a web app, so it’s always possible that some bad guy will find and exploit a bug in your site that you didn’t know existed. Keeping your server software up to date and following best practices is a good start, but it’s still all too easy to make a tiny mistake that could lead to your website getting compromised.

Website Vulnerability Scanner automatically searches out old versions of software, insecure settings, SQL and command injection bugs, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other common website security vulnerabilities so you can sleep soundly knowing that your site is safe.

Uptime Robot:

Get alerted if your site goes down.

When your site becomes unavailable to users, it’s best to be alerted long before you realize you’re no longer making any money. Uptime Robot checks that your site is functioning every five minutes and sends you a message through SMS, email, Slack, and other messaging services to make sure you are aware that your website needs attention.

It can even attempt to load your website from multiple locations to make sure any downtime isn’t just in a particular place. It can also generate custom status pages, so your customers don’t think they’re the only ones experiencing an outage.

Google Mobile-Friendly Test:

Verify that your site works well on cell phones and tablets.

Now that the majority of website visits are coming from mobile devices, it’s absolutely critical that your site performs well on them. Google knows this and factors mobile-friendliness into rankings.

If you want to make certain that your website works well on all mobile devices, even very inexpensive ones with poor connections, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can save you the hassle of doing it manually. You also get the advantage of seeing your site’s performance from Google’s perspective.

SSL Labs SSL Server Test:

Make sure your users’ data is secure between your server and their device.

SSL is complicated and easy to screw up, with potentially disastrous consequences for your website security and user trust. TLS protocol versions and cipher suites are regularly found to be insecure and must be disabled (to avoid downgrade attacks), new vulnerabilities are constantly discovered, and certificates expire frequently.

SSL Server Test from SSL Labs allows you to quickly and completely assess your SSL setup and figure out if there are any changes you need to make to maintain security. If you use a CDN like Cloudflare, you can enable SSL/TLS security features like HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) or disable old TLS versions from that control panel.

Website Penalty Indicator:

Figure out why your site dropped down the Google page.

To keep the quality of results up, Google frequently updates their search algorithms. Unfortunately, that sometimes means that a legitimate website loses a valuable position on the search result pages for a specific query.

Website Penalty Indicator will help you find out when traffic to your site dropped as a result of something Google changed, so that hopefully you can make a change to your SEO strategy to improve your position.

Google Analytics:

Keep track of your site’s bounce rate.

Millions of website owners use Google Analytics to measure how many people visit their pages, but only some of them understand and monitor one of the most important metrics that Google Analytics offers: the site’s bounce rate. It’s defined as the percentage of visitors who enter a website and immediately navigate away after viewing only one page.

A high bounce rate often means that there is something wrong with your website that is driving visitors away. Maybe the site is loading too slowly, maybe you are annoying visitors with too many pop-ups, or the content is confusing or difficult to read. In any case, it’s important to keep an eye on both the overall bounce rate of your website and the bounce rate of individual pages.

OpenLinkProfiler:

Ensure your website has a healthy link profile.

Incoming links from relevant, authoritative websites are an important ranking factor. Search engines see those links as votes that your website is valuable and worth a visit. On the flip side, too many links from questionable spam sites and irrelevant blogs can actually hurt your rankings. It’s good practice to monitor your website’s link profile and disavow the links you don’t want to have.

OpenLinkProfiler shows you which websites are linking to your own site, including the anchor text and a score quantifying the link quality. Click on the “LIS” column to list low-quality links first.

Varvy:

See how well your pages follow the Google guidelines.

The Google Webmaster Guidelines are a list of recommendations for creating Google-friendly websites. Following Google’s advice is certainly a good way to start optimizing your website for search.

Varvy is a small tool that performs a quick SEO audit of a web page and provides a report on how compliant the page is with Google’s guidelines. It detects issues such as invalid HTML, unoptimized images, missing alt text, and more. The tool gives short explanations of the technical and non-technical aspects of the analysis and helps you learn about how to improve your website.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to making a successful website or web app and keeping it running 24/7, but luckily there’s a variety of free and cheap services to help you out. Any web developer or website owner should make use of these services to make sure that their site is functional, secure, performant, and easily found for every possible customer.