Like any important asset, your website needs some regular checks and maintenance to keep it in good condition.
This doesn’t need to be a difficult or time-consuming task, in fact it’s as simple as pasting your website address into a few tools to get a report.
Here are our go-to free tools for checking website health, speed and search rankings, with some tips on how to interpret their results.
General site checks
These tools give your site a general check-up covering multiple areas. It can be an interesting exercise to compare the findings between different tools – they often give different scores or recommendations for the same basic things.
1. Hubspot Website Grader
Basic but good for a quick overview.
This tool is provided by Hubspot and provides scores out of 10 across four categories:
- Performance
- SEO
- Mobile
- Security
Unsurprisingly this tool will recommend you use Hubspot, and requires you to provide an email address.
2. PageSpeed Insights
The industry standard site measurement tool – can be a bit technical.
This Google-powered tool analyses your site and also provides scores across four key categories:
- Performance
- Accessibility
- Best Practices
- SEO
We test every site we build with this tool on launch day, and provide a summary in our launch report.
It will give you details on what’s affecting your scores, and actionable recommendations for improvement. Some of these can require technical help to resolve.
Security checks
These tools check the security-related aspects of your site, including software, configuration, server settings and more.
1. Pentest-Tools
A trusted website security test tool which gives you a quick security overview
https://pentest-tools.com/website-vulnerability-scanning/website-scanner
This site completes its report very quickly, providing a breakdown of any discovered issues classified as Critical / High / Medium / Low / Info
It’s a basic scan with a push to sign up for a more detailed one, but provides a good overview. It does not provide suggestions for remediation, but most security-related issues will require some technical assistance to resolve.
2. Immuniweb
A more comprehensive free scan, which takes a while to complete but includes a lot more detail
https://www.immuniweb.com/websec/
This tool takes around 10 minutes to complete its scan, covering many areas including web server security, software versions and fingerprinting, GDPR compliance, data scraping protection and more.
What about ‘AI’ tools?
At the time of writing, I can’t recommend one-shot ‘AI’ tools for this kind of reporting and analysis (or actually, any kind).
You can ask many AI models to look at a web page and give you a report, and they will give you text which reads like an analysis, and it will likely be mostly correct. However, they lack two very important things you need for this job – reliability and repeatability.
They are unreliable because they will claim to find issues which aren’t actually present, and will miss issues which are. In testing I’ve seen them recommend actions which will in practice have the exact opposite effect of what the model claims, or praise aesthetics which they really cannot judge one way or another.
The lack of repeatability is a problem because you don’t actually know what they are going to do each time you run them. Even if you give them a list of things to do, they won’t necessarily check the same things in the same way, which makes it difficult or impossible to address issues and re-test to ensure those issues are fixed.
One thing LLMs are quite good at is helping you write your own tools. If you can explain clearly what you want the tool to do, LLMs can produce serviceable code which – at the very least – will do the same thing each time you run it. Then you can benchmark, make changes and re-rest to see that you are moving in the right direction.
LLM tools can also be a useful addition to deterministic code-based tools, because they can sometimes spot subtle things which traditional tools miss. For example, I ran a broken link checker over a page and it came back with no broken links. An LLM tool looked at the same page and spotted that a couple of links were incorrect – not broken as in returning a 404 error, but pointing to the wrong page based on their label. That sort of issue is easy for a busy human to miss.
In conclusion
Free tools can give you a good overview of some important aspects of your website, and often a list of things which need addressing. You may be able to take care of some of these by yourself, but others will require more technical assistance.
If you’d like a second opinion or some help in improving any aspects of your website speed, SEO, accessibility or security, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
