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Eddie
Eddie

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6 essential tools you should know before launching your website

Before you launch your shiny new website, use these tools to make sure that your site is compliant, secure, high performing, and can be easily discovered by your audience.

HTML Validators

These tools look for invalid HTML on your site and show you the actual code and line numbers that you need to correct.

W3C Markup Validator

FreeFormatter

Social Media Card Testing

Tests to see how your site will look on social media feeds when someone shares or posts it. Just enter your website address and they will show you the results.

Twitter Card Validator

. How to Create a Twitter Card

LinkedIn Post Tester

Facebook Sharing Debugger

Security Scanning

Mozilla Observatory

Scans your site's infrastructure configuration to ensure that your site is safe and secure. You can also allow third-party tests to be run from Observatory. For example, a scan from ImmuniWeb will check if your site has SSL vulnerabilities.

SSL Labs

Scans your site for SSL/TLS misconfigurations and compliance.

Webmaster Search Console

These tools allow you to directly submit your website for search engine indexing. They also provide tools to measure the mobile-friendliness of your site. If you opt-in, they will periodically send you e-mail notifications if they detect an error on your site that would reduce search engine optimization.

Below are the three most popular options. Note that you will have to prove that you own your domain or are the owner of the website either by providing a specific DNS entry in your configuration or by adding a temporary meta tag to your site.

Google Search Console

Bing Webmaster Tools

Yandex Webmaster

Performance + Speed

Tests your site for speed and performance.

Google PageSpeed Insights

This is basically a web-based Lighthouse.

WebPageTest

Mobile Friendliness / Responsive

Tests to see if your site is mobile-friendly, shows you screenshots and provides suggestions on what you need to fix if your site is not mobile-friendly.

Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Bing Mobile-Friendliness Tool

Summary

Once you've launched your website, you can continuously use the above tools to make sure that your site remains secure, mobile-friendly, and delivers to your audience at blazing speeds.

Happy websiting!

You can find me on the Twitter - https://twitter.com/eddieaich

Top comments (7)

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samrose3 profile image
Sam Rose

Great list of resources! One more to add for the Social Media Card Testing would be metatags.io

Thanks again Eddie!

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joppedc profile image
JoppeDC

I would also definetly recommend setting up cloudflare. The free service has a lot of usefull features.

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kpunith8 profile image
Punith K

Thanks for sharing, didn't know about the many links listed.

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webdev_chen profile image
Uchena Miller

Thank you my guy

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prafulla-codes profile image
Prafulla Raichurkar

This is so useful, i was having issues with testing the social preview of my website on various platforms, now i can test it easily, Thank You.

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jocanola profile image
Jocanola

Thanks.

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yinks profile image
Yinka Adedire

Good stuff. Thanks.