Your website isn’t a “set it and forget it” deal. Whether it’s brand new or old enough to remember dial-up, regular checkups keep it running at peak performance. For new sites, audits provide a baseline to measure progress. For older ones, they uncover what’s slowing things down or missing the mark. Think of it like a routine health check—except for your online presence.
Here’s how to take your site’s pulse using helpful (and free!) tools that will analyze page load speed, mobile-friendliness, accessibility, and SEO performance.
Page Loading Speed
You’ve experienced it: you click on a link on your phone or laptop and…nothing happens. You wait 1 second, 5 seconds maybe, then you click the back button and move on.
In a study done by Forbes Advisor, most users tolerate up to 10 seconds of loading time. If your website’s pages take longer than that, you’re likely losing out on potential traffic. Let’s find out how fast your site loads with these tools:
#1: Google Pagespeed Insights (PSI)
Google has a browser-based page speed ranking tool that will test any URL and rank it based on the factors that affect page load speed. Google ranks your page on a scale of 0 to 100 where our recommended minimum score at First Ascent is above 70.
A great feature of this tool is how it separates the performance ranking of your website’s mobile version from the desktop one. This is important since a growing number of users view websites on their mobile devices (more on that later).
Google Pagespeed doesn’t tell you how long it took to load the page because of variables that depend on each user like their connection speed and location. Instead, Google Pagespeed lists reasons that affect load times since these are easy to quantify and judge. Plus, you’ll get tips on how to fix the issues discovered.
#2: Pingdom
Pingdom’s page loading tool is another option that offers more in-depth information.
To start a test, enter the URL of the site you wish to audit and choose from different servers located around the globe. Offering this option is a huge plus for international websites, as it gives owners a better idea of how their site might perform when accessed from a different continent.
You’ll get a performance grade after you run a test as well as more detailed information on files that were tested, what tests were run, and performance insights. Many of the data are color-coded so you can quickly pick out performance bottlenecks and find a solution right away.
Responsive (or Mobile-Friendly) Testing
Being mobile-friendly or not is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity. This is how you can test your site’s usability on mobile.
#3: Chrome Lighthouse
Start by running your site through Chrome Lighthouse, a powerful open-source tool from Google that evaluates your website’s performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices. Lighthouse runs a series of audits, simulating how your site loads and performs under real-world conditions. It then provides a detailed report with scores and actionable insights to improve speed, mobile usability, and overall user experience.
Two common issues it detects on mobile sites are poor tap target sizing and low contrast text. If buttons or links are too close together, users may accidentally tap the wrong one, leading to frustration. Similarly, if text lacks contrast or is too small, readability suffers, negatively impacting accessibility. Lighthouse helps identify these problems and suggests fixes to ensure your site is mobile-friendly, loads efficiently, and meets modern web standards.
#4: Responsinator
Next, run your site through Responsinator. Responsinator is a simple web page that loads your site in representations of the most common devices. While Google’s tool checks mainly for mobile-friendliness, this one checks how responsive your website is, or how it’s displayed on a range of devices. You can quickly test your site on multiple devices, and navigate through your site. You might then discover that while your mobile site looks great on an iOS device like the iPhone X (or what Responsinator jokingly calls the iPhone eXpensive), that might not be the case on Google’s Pixel 2, which runs on Android.
Accessibility
Did you know there are standards for accessibility on the web? Accessibility means that people with color blindness, full blindness, and deafness, can still access your website. For example, Some people with disabilities browse the web through screen readers that read aloud to them the content on the screen. Roughly 20% of people qualify as having some form of disability and would benefit from accessibility on the web, so make sure your site’s easy to use for one-fifth of your audience. Here’s how to check if your website is accessible.
#5: AChecker
AChecker is an accessibility checker similar to the other browser-based tools we’ve seen. Input your URL and it will show you the rules that your site has passed or failed. These are divided into Known Errors, Likely Problems, and Potential Problems.
Since the list of issues might be a lot to pore through, try focusing on the larger errors. Sometimes the minor errors aren’t as necessary or can be redundant. Also, some design decisions (such as low color contrast) will break accessibility rules. If this is the case on your site, you can instead use the results as a guide on design tweaks you can do.
#6: WAVE Web Checker
WAVE Web Checker is a more interactive accessibility checker. If your website caters to people with disabilities or you simply want it to be accessible to more people, this tool will help you get there.
Recommendations are marked with icons representing passing or failing of rules next to the affected elements. This gives you a quick and easy way to have a visual rundown of the site.
You can also dig deeper into the evaluation of your website with WAVE’s detailed explanations on errors, why these matter, and how to fix them. Plus, it gives you an outline of the page so you can have a visual representation of what’s wrong and where it is exactly.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is critical to bringing organic and free traffic to your website through search engines like Google and Bing. SEO is a large and complex topic, complete with experts, gurus, hacks, best practices, poor practices, and everything else in between.
Mastering SEO is difficult, but implementing the factors that give you 80% of the benefit is easy. The site checkers below let you check best practices that your site meets, help make sure you didn’t miss anything, and educate you along the way.
#7: SEO Toolbox
SEO Toolbox is a professional, monthly subscription service that performs a very thorough check against known good and bad SEO practices. It also has a 7-day trial program for those who don’t want to dive fully into the tool yet. The free trial allows you to run checkups on five sites, which should cover your site and your closest competitors. It checks for the site title, description, keyword density, headings, robots.txt, sitemap, SEO-friendly URLs, and much more. At the same time, it provides a good description of what each requirement is and why it’s useful. As its name suggests, SEO Toolbox is chock-full of analysis and monitoring tools to check your website’s SEO.
Your Toolbox is Full—Now What?
Time to take your website’s pulse! These tests aren’t the end-all, be-all, carved-in-stone commandments. Sometimes, design, development, or budget decisions mean bending the “rules” a bit—and that’s totally fine.
Since different tools analyze things in different ways, don’t just rely on one. A mix of tools gives you a more complete picture of how your site is really performing.
Bottom line? Regular website audits keep you in the know, help you spot issues before they become headaches, and show you exactly what to tweak for a smoother, faster, and more effective site.
If you’re still not sure where to start, or you need more expert guidance, First Ascent Design has your back! We’ll help optimize your site so it works for you, not against you. Reach out today and happy testing!