15 Tools for Testing your Website

If you want to have the same experience over multiple browsers and different machines then testing your website is vital. In this article I’ve gathered some of the most important tools that you can use in testing your site against various errors – CSS Errors, HTML Errors, Crossbrowsing Errors etc.

Validators

w3-validator

1. HTML Validator
http://validator.w3.org/
This HTML Validator – checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc.

2. CSS Validator
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
The CSS Validator – validates CSS stylesheets or documents using CSS stylesheets.

3. Links Validator
http://validator.w3.org/checklink
The Link Checker analyzes anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links.

4. RSS Feed Validator
http://validator.w3.org/feed/
This is the W3C Feed Validation Service, a free service that checks the syntax of Atom or RSS feeds

5. Free Site Validator
http://freesitevalidator.com/
This service scans your entire site for validation errors and dead links and generates report status in real time.

Accessibility

WAVE_Web-Accessibility-Evaluation-Tool

6. WebAIM Wave
http://wave.webaim.org/
Wave is my favorite Accessibility service – it shows you the mistakes and it is quite productive.

7. Functional Accessibility Evaluator
http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/
Use this tool to evaluate the functional accessibility of your web site.

8. Hera
http://www.sidar.org/hera/
HERA is a tool to check the accessibility of Web pages accoridng to the specification Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(WCAG 1.0).

Cross Browser Testing

xenocode

9. Xenocode
http://www.xenocode.com/Browsers/
Using Xenocode you can run any browser you want. Yes, even IE6, IE7 and IE8 simultaneous.

10. Browsershots
http://browsershots.org/
A great service for testing your site on all browsers on most operating systems.

11. IeTester
http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/
This is a tool that incorporates all version of IE in one desktop application.

12. Microsoft Expression SuperPreview
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/
The new tool from Microsoft is designed to help you compare your site on different browsers.

Website Performance Testing

Pingdom-Tools

13. Pingdom Tools
http://tools.pingdom.com
Analyzing your website speed and breaking down the way elements are loaded.

14. YSlow
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
The authority tool in optimizing your website and gaining additional speed.

15. Web Page Analyzer
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
A simple yet very useful service that generates a report related to your website performance.
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Conclusion

You can try and run these validators across your site and see what improvements you could add. I bet that everyone will find at least 10 improvements after checking with this services. Enjoy and Cheers!

Andy Gongea is a passionate UI/UX designer with a great appetite for technology and trends. Currently he owns, a future wife, a loan that comes with a monthly fee and some strange ideas about user interface and user interaction. Cheers!

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