Website Evaluation, Website Graders, Software Tests, Scoring Website Quality
Elements that are covered as part of website evaluation and website graders include the content, colors, design, functionality, search engine optimization, social media and more can be evaluated with scores.
Quality and value for the website visitor are priorities that are covered by website evaluation, grading.
Evaluate your online work and website from the standpoint of these questions.
- Is it easy to read without straining?
- Is it easy to navigate and find things?
- Is it clean looking and uncluttered so visitors focus on what is important?
- Does it provide quality and value for the visitors?
- Is it set up so the call-to-action items are going to convert visitors into subscribers or customers?
The list below shows popular software for evaluating the many aspects of your online marketing.
1. Hubspot Website Grader – This is a good place to start. Scores Performance, SEO, Upload Speed, Mobile, Security and More. The results give directions for improving site and marketing
2. Wave.webaim.org – Design, Colors, Contrast, Errors, Readability, Functionality. Crawls the site and shows a variety of errors including readability errors due to lack of contrast and more.
3. Tools.pingdom.com – Tests website speed and offers specific stats so you can tell what issues to address to speed up the website.
4. GTMetrix.com – Another excellent website speed test with graders, scores and analytics to tell you how to improve the site.
5. Google Analytics – A necessity for evaluating hundreds or thousands of aspects of your website. You can focus on the graphs that are most important for whichever project on the site you are working with at the time. There is a broad overview with the basic important stats too. Using these stats is a critical part of designing the site to function well.
6. Google Webmaster Tools – Lists errors, queries and your site rank for the keywords, backlinks and hundreds of other scores. Check the queries, which are the keywords people use to find your site and see how your site ranks for the keyword. Many other necessary stats.
7. Facebook Insight Analytics – Lists stats for Overview, Visits, Likes, Posts, People, Organic, Paid and more. Includes Facebook Ads analytics and analytics on each individual piece of content uploaded. Check under Insight and under Notifications on your Facebook dashboard.
8. Twitter Notifications – Includes mentions, favorited tweets. Twitter also includes numbers of followers, following and more.
9. Youtube Analytics – Extensive analytics for each video and for the whole channel are available under Analytics. Includes views for each video, engagement, shares to social media, likes, where viewed, audience stats and more.
10. Wordstream – Grades your Google Adwords account and offers suggestions.
11. Yoast.com – The Yoast seo plugin for wp gives grading, scores and directions for improvement on each piece of content you add to your wp site. It is the pillar of seo for blogs and websites using WordPress. Yoast is the internet’s authority on the art and science of website optimization and internet marketing.
12. Siteliner.com – Evaluates a long list of website characteristics. For example, it not only evaluates the site for duplicate content for also for common content and unique content.
13. Responsinator.com – Grades the site for mobile responsiveness. Google now evaluates your websites ability to respond to mobile devices and display on them as part of the search engine ranking.
14. Another Quality recommendation for websites is to have the SSL Certificate . This means an added layer of security provides encryption and there is additional validation of the website, domain and owner. Having the SSL Certificate for your website has been verified by Google as being part of the ranking score. A site with the https:// and the lock icon will have a slight edge of over one without.
15. While not a specific software the 200 objective items that Google uses to rank your website can be found backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
16. Another important checklist and web authority on websites, seo and marketing is the Moz Blog. For top, well respected, white hat ethical techniques follow the directions from Moz.
17. Alexa.com – one of the top, well respected internet authorities. Provides a variety of useful stats on your website. You can also enter in your competitiors’ sites and get stats on them too.
18. seocentro.com. Measure site seo and upload speed with the free tool at seocentro.com. Along with the scores it evaluates and provides suggestions to improve the scores.
19. testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ – Test your site for mobile friendliness and mobile upload speed.
Opinions Versus Objective Measurement – Consider Both in Designing a Site
Often we all ask friends or family for opinions and then make changes to please them. These subjective opinions can be useful but objective measurement with software checkers and Google recommended steps are important.
Personal choices are important from the standpoint of making choices that are compatible with our values and preferences. The trick is to find a way to combine those personal preferances with meeting the objective points needed to do well on the internet.
As the list above shows, everything from the colors and contrasts on the homepage to the ads, social media, videos and more are evaluated with scores by online crawlers.
Using the software to do evals of your online presence gives you a chance to see the site as the crawlers see it and make changes that will make the site successful with people and with search engines.