6. GTmetrix
What it is:GTmetrixis a web page speed tool
What you can optimize:page load speed
How to use it:enter any URL and click 'Test your site' for a basic speed test. Click the drop-down on each recommendation to learn how to make your page load faster.
7. WAVE
What it is:WAVEis a web accessibility evaluation tool
What you can optimize:find accessibility issues like missing alt text, small text size, and contrast errors that make your content inaccessible to screen readers
How to use it:enter any URL and click through the icon-coded errors to see what to change and learn why improved accessibility is important
The seven tools we listed above prove you don’t need to spend money to start optimizing your website.
Butif you want to go deeper into optimizing a specific area of your website—for example, making a landing page load faster or finding a new keyword for a blog post—here’s a look at the different types of web optimization you can focus on, and more tools that will help you get the job done.
Broadly, most web optimization tools fall into six main categories:
Page speed
Search engine optimization (SEO)
User experience (UX)
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Mobile-first
Accessibility
Some tools help you work on more than one area at once—for example, Hotjar can be used to improve UXandconversion rates on desktop and mobile—but in general, you’ll need touse multiple tools to optimize your entire website.
Think of it like one big optimization ecosystem: if you improve your website speed, you also impact your SEO, UX, and CRO efforts. As long as your mindset is focused on making your website better, you’ll get a lot out of the tools we discuss below.
1. Web page speed tools
A slow website can drive users away and hurt search rankings. Web page speed tools aren’t going to fix your slow site on their own, but they willmeasure page speed andshow you what’s slowing it down.You’ll be able to pinpoint how to improve page load times by following recommendations like
Reducing and compressing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images
Caching content
Using faster-hosting servers
4. CRO tools
When done right, CROincreases the number of website visitors that become customers(or perform any desired action on your site).
There’s no single tool that improves conversion rate, but with a combination of
Traditional analytics (tools like Google Analytics)
Behavior analytics software (tools likeheatmaps,session recordings,andon-site surveys)
Testing tools (e.g. Omniconvert)
you’llget a full picture of what’s happening on your siteso you can give people what they need to convert.
Popular CRO tools
Hotjar
Optimizely
AB Tasty
5. Mobile optimization tools
More people browse websites onmobilethan desktop, so mobile-first optimization can help youensure people view your site correctly on phones and tablets. Web elements like pop-ups, image-heavy pages, and tiny text can make your site difficult to navigate on mobile.
Of course, generalizations aren’t always helpful, so check your analytics data tofind out what percentage of your users and customers browse on mobile devices and understand how important mobile optimization is to your business.
If you're using Hotjar, for example, your dashboard gives you an at-a-glance breakdown of your site visitors' devices.
A widget in the Hotjar dashboard
Popular mobile optimization tools
Hotjar
PageSpeed Insights
Google Search Console
Google Analytics
👉 Find out how to increase mobile conversion rate in thismobile optimization case study(mobile conversions went up by 63%).
6. Accessibility tools
An accessible website is easy for everyone to use—which is a win-win for you and your visitors: great UX for them and more happy customers for you.
Accessibility tools show you how your landing pages appear on a screen reader or to people with various impairments (for example, different types of colorblindness). These tools also provide optimization suggestions tomake your website more inclusive.
Popular accessibility optimization tools
The one website optimization tactic that always works
So far, we’ve listed 30+ web optimization tools that you can use right now to grow your website traffic and revenue. And there are thousands more where those came from.
So, where do you start?
This may surprise you, but it’s not with a tool at all. While you and your competitors have access to the same optimization tools, there is one thing that’s unique to you:yourcustomers and how they behave onyoursite.
Experience your site through your users' eyes
Even if you have the fastest website on the planet and rank high for your target keywords, no amount of speed or SEO ‘best practices’ will help youunderstand what your users do on your site or how they experience its pages.
Entersession recordings, which help youunderstand the experiences of individual users on your site.Using recordings, watch how real people get stuck and progress through your funnel, and see what they do right before they convert or leave. You’ll witness frustratedrage clicking, spot and fix website bugs, and get a clear picture of what really needs to be optimized.
But truly being on the same page as your users doesn't stop at seeing what they do; it also involves hearing what they have to say, in their own words. Combine insights from surveys, interviews, and user feedback tools with session recordings for a complete understanding of what users say and what they do.
Hotjar enables you to effortlessly move between user behavior insights from all of these tools for a holistic understanding of your site's user experience. How?
Get user feedback sent to a dedicated Microsoft Teams or Slack channel to hear what users say as they say it. Then, in a single click, view a recording of the user who left the response to see the actions that prompted their feedback.
Send an exit-intent survey to users who drop off at key places in your funnel to understand what you could do differently to make them stay. Follow up with a 1:1 interview hosted in Hotjar Engage to get more detailed insights and optimization ideas.
View heatmaps of low-converting pages for an aggregate view of user behavior. When you spot head-scratching user activity, like scrolling that stops before your first call-to-action button, jump into session recordings to understand why users didn't make it further down the page.
Once you know how users navigate your website and what they expect from it, you can develop an optimization strategy that delivers exactly what they need.
