Web Design Tools – Free Tools for Website Audit
When doing web design, it’s crucial to use all the necessary web design tools at your disposal to optimize it and make it presentable. However, you also have to properly monitor all the statistics needed to see what needs improvement and how well your site is doing.
Knowing the statistics and how to properly audit your website through information given by the statistics can make or break your website. Don’t panic! We’re here to help.
Let us introduce the three Google tools that’ll help you properly monitor, optimize, and design your website to the fullest extent!
Google Webmaster
This is the best service that helps you track how your website is doing in search results. Not only does it help you evaluate your SEO, but it also helps you maintain your website’s performance as well!
This web design tool is a service that anyone with a website can use, you also don’t have to pay for it because it’s a free service! Even though you don’t necessarily need this to get a spot in Google’s search results, it can help give insight and valuable information that can help boost and further improve your marketing.
The way Google Webmaster monitors your website’s data and performance is like this:
Google Webmaster makes you cherry pick posts that you want to submit new pages for and ones that you don’t want to show up in the search engine. This is great for filtering out content that may not be relevant for the time being!
It helps verify that the content you post on your website can be seen and accessed by Google’s search engine. Moreover, it can also be used with malware and adware detection that may impact user experience when people access your website.
Google Webmaster also helps you understand what’s getting your website views by showing you popular queries and keywords that are making your website pop out on the search bar. Not only that, but you can also see websites that link to yours, and you can check for mobile and tablet optimization for people searching on those devices!
Setting it up is a piece of cake too, and Google Webmaster guides you through it step by step!
Google Analytics
Chances are, you probably have Google Analytics enabled for your website. However, we’re also willing to bet that you don’t know how to fully take advantage of all the data and information that it gives you.
Measuring your traffic through this web design tool, knowing your demographic, which pages are the most popular on your site, and knowing how optimized your website is are only some of the many information that you can get just from using this tool. Utilizing that knowledge can open up loads of different things about your website.
Taking a look at your daily traffic lets you know when your peak hours are. Knowing what your demographic is will let you better understand which audience type you should be catering to. Knowing which pages and posts garner the most attention will show you what people are interested in. Information like this is what can help your website skyrocket in popularity and show flaws that you have to fix.
A great way of starting your Google Analytics is by setting up goals. This basically measures how well your site fulfills a target objective, which can contribute to your website’s success!
Importance Of Standard Report Features
Next, knowing how you can utilize the information through the standard report features on Analytics is also great if you want to look for specific information and data. Through the reports feature, you can opt to view data and analytics on specific dates and create comparisons to see which days you perform better and why.
Adding Site Search
Having a site search option is a great way to make your customer’s user experience a lot easier. This is also a cheeky way of getting to know what queries and things they’re searching on your site.
Google Lighthouse
This web design tool was made specifically for auditing your website based on a specific set of parameters. Everything from metrics, mobile compatibility, web app implementations, and website optimization, it does all the work for you too!
All you really have to do is send it a URL or let it run on a new tab and let it do its work. After a few minutes, it’ll send an elaborate and heavily detailed report about your site. Usually, a professional auditor would take days, if not weeks, to send even a short report!
Features And Audit Metrics
Google Lighthouse will give you metrics and information for both the desktop and mobile versions of your website. This is to ensure that both will be optimized to the fullest extent. This also makes it so that desktop and mobile users get the same quality experience from scrolling through your website!
The main metrics that will be measured and prioritized in the metric are:
Accessibility- This metric will measure how accessible your website is based on all the accessibility features you added to your site. This includes possible audio captions, button names, and etc. This metric is the most meticulous one since it bases it on a pass/fail basis.
This means that you get an instant 0 if, for example, even the slightest thing on your page isn’t screen-reader friendly. The sum of all of these attributes will be your accessibility metric result!
Performance- This one scores you based on how well your website performs in loading speed, displaying important information to the user, time elapsed when loading basic frames, and a lot more! This essentially shows you how optimized your website is on both desktop and mobile devices.
Always aim for a score that is at least above 85 or 90!
PWA Score- This is basically how consistent or “progressive” your website is. This basically means that it should work on any device or browser, it has consistently fast browsing and loading speed, adjust to any screen size, and have a custom offline page.
With all these web design tools at your disposal, you’ll surely be the golden standard of what a good website should be!