Recommended Technical Sites & Tools

MXToolbox® – Supertool

ABOUT THE SUPERTOOL!

All of your MX record, DNS, blacklist and SMTP diagnostics in one integrated tool.  Input a domain name or IP Address or Host Name. Links in the results will guide you to other relevant tools and information.  And you’ll have a chronological history of your results.

Source:  https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx

How do we use this tool?

Some of the reasons we use this tool:

• Evaluate whether a domain NameServer or DNS records are moved to a new host or IP address after migrating a website.
• Check that the domain MX records (those records used for email) are correct.  This is especially helpful in resolving email deliverability issues.
• Ensure we create properly formatted SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to help with email deliverability. Some ISPs (Internet Service Providers) will push emails without proper DNS records directly to spam folders or block them altogether without these records.

PageSpeed Insights (PSI)

The Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool reports on a page’s user experience on mobile and desktop devices and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved. PSI provides both lab and field data about a page. Lab data is useful for debugging issues, as it is collected in a controlled environment.  Many times, field data is not available. While PSI does not cover all user experiences, the field data in PageSpeed Insights is accurate overall IF available, but in many cases, a full picture is unavailable; for example, users can bypass the field data collected by using the Chrome Browser’s Incognito Mode.

For those WordPress websites that utilize the Site Kit by Google plugin (it displays Google Analytics, Google Search Console, etc.) in the site admin dashboard, there is also a panel that provides an overview example of performance with the PSI tool.  This is a generalization of performance and should not be considered exhaustive, but is one of many tools available to site owners, web designers,  WordPress developers, and SEO Professionals.

Source: https://pagespeed.web.dev/

GTMetrix

Another tool for measuring performance is the use of a paid version of GTMetrix. Again, the analysis is generated on a page-by-page (URL) basis but has extension options to include the device model for testing and the location of the testing server in the GTMetrix network.

While PageSpeed Insights is free and its results are sometimes considered best for SEO because of how its metrics are generated (it’s a Google tool), the paid version of GTmetrix provides a closer idea of overall website performance based on the customization options available for selection.

See our article on Performance Optimization above.

Solarwinds® Pingdom®

This is a paid tool that provides comprehensive website monitoring for both Synthetic Monitoring (simulated) results and Real User Monitoring.

While the standard Pingdom application is paid, they do provide a free Pingdom Website Speed Test.  We often use this tool in addition to PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix when conducting a website audit to troubleshoot an inherited website and pinpoint issues on a granular basis.

Source:  https://tools.pingdom.com/

WebAIM WAVE® – Website Accessibility Evaluation Tool

WAVE^® is a suite of evaluation tools that helps authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. WAVE can identify many accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors, but also facilitates human evaluation of web content. Our philosophy is to focus on issues that we know impact end users, facilitate human evaluation, and to educate about web accessibility.

Source:  https://wave.webaim.org/

The WebAIM WAVE® tool is available as a browser app along with the standalone test available on the website above.  We can quickly assess issues to remediate, such as contrast, accessibility errors, problems with page structure that would confuse a screen reader device (such as incorrect heading structures), and more.

It should be stressed that while a website might test as error-free, generally, only user testing with a variety of assistive devices can certify 100% accessibility compliance.