There are amazing tools and websites set up to help you do your web site better. Today I am focusing on performance and validating functionality. Several tools are Firefox plugins and some are web based. So lets get started with site performance first:
My favorite validation tool is Is My Website Working
A Great Site for Checking Your WordPress Compression and Caching. Here is what the results look like on my personal blog uber.la.
And let’s run it on FluentSearch as well.
So if uber.la is SLOW at 1.12 seconds, then Fluent is WAY SLOW at 4.39 seconds. I have not migrated Fluent from my old servers. Uber.la was really hammering my old host and causing not only problems for my visitors but problems for the host as well. Doesn’t seem possible, but my little ol’ neck of the web was being punished my constant stream of 3 – 5 concurrent visitors. Even with caching on I was getting timeout errors.
But the move was not easy. Anyone reading Fluent here, have any good tools for migration, besides the old export/import process? I couldn’t get the target URL to resolve to the actual domain until the DNS servers had been updated. So a lot of my uber.la images were pointing to something like this 128.33.3.33/uber.la/images… and that little IP address string was wreaking havoc on my site. But I can’t figure out how to do the import, into a live WordPress site, unless the WordPress site is UP. And I could only access the pre-DNS transferred site with the IP address included. UG! There’s got to be a better way.
Okay, next tool.
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Compete’s Site Profile Extension
See what Compete Sees for Any Site
This information is displayed in the bottom edge of the browser. I’d like to know what “Neutral” is. And at the moment I DON’T accept ads on uber.la so my “Deals” and $$ sections are grayed out.
And from the looks of the preferences panel they need to update for BING.
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Google’s Page Speed Extension
This is a variation on the Y-Slow from Yahoo. They are both FireBug additions. So you have to have FireBug installed first.
Here is what Page Speed reported about FluentSearch.
Yikes! I’ve got a little work to do.
And here’s how Y-Slow runs the same report.
Double Yikes!
Let’s run them on uber.la just for comparison.
Page Speed
And Y-Slow:
Well I guess I don’t always do what I say. I will look over these reccomendations this weekend and see if I can improve both sites.
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The BING and GOOGLE Comparinator (sounds like something from Phenias and Ferb, but okay)
One of the best ways to understand Bing’s new humanized-search function is to compare it to the Google results.This little tool does a bit of the work for you. The first screen is merely a search entry box. But when you do a search here’s what you get:
I’ll do a deeper exploration into Bing in a later post. But go poke around and see what you like and what you don’t. It’s a new dawn in search. Certainly not a Google-killer, but perhaps a Yahoo-hurting-2nd-tier search option.
So that’s 5 tools for today (plus Firebug, makes 6, so even a Bonus Tool!)
Go have at it.
Let me know if you have other favorites in the comments or by contacting me directly.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/SEO-Tools
