Not a single lighthouse: how to check your site from all sides

When we talk about web validators and website optimization for them, we most often mean Lighthouse / Pagespeed Insights from Google, which has long become the de facto standard for assessing website performance. Someone strives for the coveted 100 points even on prototypes and template applications in two buttons, someone jokingly creates an absolutely inaccessible site with an ideal rating, but for all front-end developers, the lighthouse provides sane, albeit rather superficial, site performance analytics and the search for bottle neck. However, download speed is just one of the many parameters that you should check on your site, and most others have their own validators and scoring algorithms. We will consider the tools for each of the significant areas and make a list according to which it is worth running your site, so as not to manually catch problems in the future.

What are we going to pay attention to?

The breakdown into categories can be different for everyone, we will take the following:

  • Performance, there are already enough broken copies about it
  • Accessibility, next in importance
  • Code purity and quality
  • Network checks
  • SEO and the rest

Availability

The main headache for a developer after loading speed is to provide users of all groups with a convenient interaction with the site. It’s simple, just follow the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), arrange alternative text for pictures, forms and icons, monitor the page readability from the screen reader, comply with i18n and a bunch of other things from the w3 standards that cannot be kept in mind, but it is important not to forget on the web.

Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

WAVE it is a comprehensive tool showing jambs in contrast, alt-s, form labels, heading order and aria properties. Works in a browser, shows all problems in a preview:

Automated Accessibility Testing Tool

AATT by PayPal, the all-powerful harvester, the standard validation tool for a bunch of big companies. It works not only with the web, therefore it sits on the localhost, knows how to communicate via API with other servers on your machine.

Ax by Deque

Ax is part of AATT but is also available as a standalone Chrome extension. Suitable for a quick check of an already calibrated product. In general, it has a pretty cool ecosystem, which is used by such giants as Google and Microsoft.

WCAG

The above guidelines not a tool in and of itself, but a checklist is also handy. Some people print them on their walls and check them on the go.

The code

It is important to remember here that all these validators are ordinary algorithms that can make mistakes and in 90% of cases will find something to bite you for. Just pay attention to your jambs and ignore software jambs.

Nu HTML Checker

Nu – handy HTML validator from W3C with detailed warnings and checking many non-obvious rules:

CSS Validator

As the name suggests, verbose CSS validator from the W3C, aggregates errors and dumps tons of warnings that simply cannot be taken and fixed in one go.

CSS Stats

Awesome servicewhich visually parses your CSS into pieces. It will show in the order of use all colors, sizes, typefaces, calculate all properties, indents, z-indices, and generally help to cope with noodle-like styles:

i18n Checker

This checker will show the languages ​​used, check the contents of the corresponding tags and headers. Rarely needed, but useful.

Rocketvalidator

Service really parses HTML and CSS very quickly, but the scoring is not finished yet.

Network and links

Link Checker

Cool checker from W3C, documents response codes and actual problems with all links that can be reached at a given recursion depth

Optimization check for mobile devices

This google portal shows underutilized resources and displays content loaded by robots.

Pagewatch

Worthy Wannabe Lighthouse, which also knows how to check the integrity of links. In general, he can do a lot of things and also gives analytics on all weak points and offers accurate scoring.

SEO and more

Browseo

Tool, showing the site from the point of view of search bots.

Majestic report

Statistics with a bunch of charts on trends and topics.

Sitecheck

Light security audit with its own scoring and monitoring of blacklists / scam / spam. Searches for vulnerabilities and offers solutions:

Favicon check

This tool will check the availability and compatibility of site icons for all platforms, including mobile icons for PWA.

Conclusion

Of course, these are not all possible useful checkers, but they are all useful and make manual work easier for the developer. You can look at even more tools for security analysis, network routes, and SEO, but these are still rather narrow-profile tasks that simple web services will perform poorly. If you have a favorite validation or scoring tool that we haven’t mentioned, let us know in the comments.


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