9 tools to test your site

2 min readJul 15, 2015

They’re free. They’re simple. Did I mention they’re free?

No, sorry. Opening your site in another browser doesn’t count as testing. But front-end testing doesn’t have to be hard. Below are my favorite tools.

Cross-browser testing

Quick-and-dirty
Microsoft gives you static shots of your site on various browsers & devices.

More detailed
Install the major browsers and poke around yourself. Unfortunately, that still includes Internet Explorer. On a Mac?

Check your analytics to see what devices your users have. Then use Chrome’s great built-in emulators to simulate these phones & tablets.

A lot can go into SEO, but something super simple is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Not passing it may affect your placement on Google.

Know any good “general SEO” tests? Let me know…

Facebook makes it easy to preview what your site looks like when someone shares it on Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere. They even help debug any issues.

Anyone who’s styled an email knows what a pain it is. Litmus offers comprehensive email tools and free previews of your CSS emails.

You already know how important it is, right? For testing color deficiencies, I like the Spectrum Chrome extension (specifically testing for Deuteranomaly, the most common deficiency). For testing text contrast, check out Colorable.

There are many tools out there to determine bottlenecks and where you’re missing best practices. Two I like are Pingdom and GTmetrix.

We all have some. There are more complicated (and better) solutions, but you can get a rough sense of problems using Chrome’s DevTools.

Hopefully these make your life a little bit easier. Have any suggestions of your own?