Website Tools
When it comes to understanding where your website stands compared to your competitors, there are a lot of website tools in this trade. Throughout this article, I’m going to describe some of the common tools I use in my line of work when it comes to assisting my clients in accomplishing their goals with their business and online presence.
First, let’s start with why you would use any tool, to begin with. When it comes to User Experience, UX, as well as how Google perceives you, there’s a lot of data we can gather to give a general idea of what is going on. We use these tools to obtain knowledge, statistics, and information about our users and their experience.
Anything and everything can come into play when it comes to your user experience. Does the site load in a timely manner, or do they simply exit before the site even loads?
Fact: If your site takes forever to load, people are leaving before they even see your website. That means a loss of customer awareness when it comes to the products and services you provide.
Other factors include bounce rate; how soon people leave your site at first glance. Do they read the content, do they scroll the page, and if so, how far do they scroll? Do they click links on your site, engagement?
All these factors and more are available with the right website tools.
Google Analytics
One of the first website tools I set up for my clients if they don’t already have it is Google Analytics. This is a simple and free app, provided by Google, that tracks an enormous amount of information and data about your user base. Location, how they came upon your site, how long they stayed, bounce rate, and depending on how you set it up, many other factors can be tracked.
Google Analytics is a necessary website tool for any small business owner. It’s free and it provides the information you need to know if you are trying to determine the success of your website. You can see statistics. For example, how many visitors you are getting a day over time. From there you can see if your site is growing, dying, or simply maintaining.
Some of the data Google Analytics tracks include but not limited to.
Trends
Spikes in traffic, days, and time you get the most traffic
Traffic
Each day’s visitor count
Location
Where your traffic is coming from
Bounce Rate
How many leave your site at first glance
Scroll Rate
How far visitors scroll down the pages
And more.
Google Search Console
When it comes to website tools, one tool I use is Google Search Console. This is another free tool provided by Google to see what kind of errors your site may be experiencing when it comes to being crawled and indexed by the Google search engine.
There’s quite a bit you can do in Google Search Console from acquiring data on how many impressions your site has had to how many times people clicked on those impressions. Updating your sitemaps (basically a listing of all the available pages you have on your website).
Google Search Console is an invaluable resource if you wish to be successful with having a website.
Google Search Console as well as Google Analytics do have a learning curve involved. If you don’t want to figure it out or read a bunch of documentation and rather have someone else take care of it. TECH-Butlers is here in service for you and your business 😉
Google Search Console is mostly used for the following:
Making sure things are in order, mobile friendly, etc.
That your sitemaps are working.
That the site can be crawled successfully
When it was last indexed.
SEMrush
Now the next of the website tools I commonly find myself using is SEMrush, a pretty advanced piece of equipment, and software. It can be quite pricy, but in my line of work, it’s a necessity. SEMrush is designed specifically for SEO work. It does many things from analyzing your website to doing audits and crawling the site to reveal errors and misalignment with the SEO friendliness of your site. SEMrush also helps with keyword research and provides information on your competition.
SEMrush is used for
Doing site audits
Finding errors
Doing checks on keywords
Checking traffic sources
and more
GTMetrix
GTMetrix is another tool that I use very often to analyze the speed and bloat of a website. This website provides an in-depth analysis of how your website loads and what is causing it to load slowly. After the website is analyzed, you are given a score out of 100. The higher the number, the faster and more efficient your website is loading.
It has certain features to show the exact bottlenecks within your website’s performance. Again, there is a learning curve to it, and if you are not a programmer/developer, some of the information may go over your head. In this case, you can always come to us and we will help you understand what is going on with your website.
Website tools are vital for website success in this day and age. With technology becoming more advanced, people’s attention spans have decreased dramatically. If your website is not loading quickly, is not easy to navigate, or is not engaging, you will lose website visitors and potential customers.
Google Developer Tools
Within the Chrome browser, there is a tool called “Developer Tools” within. You simply right-click the page and then click inspect from the menu. When it comes to website design tools, this is by far #1. You can see the source code and the CSS (cascading style sheets) that deal with the graphics of the webpage.
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is a product developed by Microsoft. It’s a free application and quite powerful when it comes to building websites and coding in general. Personally, I use it every single day. And I find it to be the best IDE out there for managing the web pages that I have to work on. As well as logging into the server that I have here locally at my house when I need to do more advanced work, such as React and Next.js on my node.js server.
Visual Studio Code is a great application to have if you need to do any kind of website work.
PhotoShop
The next app I use a lot is the Adobe Create Suite, and that includes PhotoShop. PhotoShop is just an app for drawings and PSD, which are usually what I work with when a designer sends me a page to build. They draw it up in PhotoShop and I convert it into a working website.
Tools for building websites are many, but these are the top 7 tools I use in my line of work.
Make sure you are using website tools to your advantage and if you need help, don’t hesitate to contact us. We would be more than happy to assist you in making your website a success!
Conclusion:
If you don’t have the time to figure out all this website stuff, we at TECH-Butlers are here for you. Simply schedule a call and we can discover together whether we are in alignment with your goals, with your business, and how we can be of service to you and your organization.
TECH-Butlers: Your on call, on-demand tech guru. We fix, maintain, and manage websites.
Visit our homepage and click the button to schedule a call.
-Jake Laura
