15 Tools for Testing your Website

If you want to have the same experience over multiple browsers and different machines then testing your website is vital. In this article Ive gathered some of the most important tools that you can use in testing your site against various errors CSS Errors, HTML Errors, Cross-browsing Errors etc.

Validators
1. HTML Validator http://validator.w3.org/ This HTML Validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. 2. CSS Validator http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ The CSS Validator validates CSS stylesheets or documents using CSS stylesheets. 3. Links Validator http://validator.w3.org/checklink The Link Checker analyzes anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links. 4. RSS Feed Validator http://validator.w3.org/feed/ This is the W3C Feed Validation Service, a free service that checks the syntax of Atom or RSS feeds 5. Free Site Validator http://freesitevalidator.com/ This service scans your entire site for validation errors and dead links and generates report status in real time.

Accessibility
6. WebAIM Wave http://wave.webaim.org/ Wave is my favorite Accessibility service it shows you the mistakes and it is quite productive. 7. Functional Accessibility Evaluator http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/ Use this tool to evaluate the functional accessibility of your web site. 8. Hera http://www.sidar.org/hera/ HERA is a tool to check the accessibility of Web pages according to the specification Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(WCAG 1.0).

Cross Browser Testing

9. Xenocode http://www.xenocode.com/Browsers/ Using Xenocode you can run any browser you want. Yes, even IE6, IE7 and IE8 simultaneous. 10. Browsershots http://browsershots.org/ A great service for testing your site on all browsers on most operating systems. 11. IeTester http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/ This is a tool that incorporates all version of IE in one desktop application. 12. Microsoft Expression SuperPreview http://www.microsoft.com/expression/ The new tool from Microsoft is designed to help you compare your site on different browsers.

Website Performance Testing

13. Pingdom Tools http://tools.pingdom.com Analyzing your website speed and breaking down the way elements are loaded. 14. YSlow http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ The authority tool in optimizing your website and gaining additional speed. 15. Web Page Analyzer http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ A simple yet very useful service that generates a report related to your website performance.

Conclusion
You can try and run these validators across your site and see what improvements you could add. I bet that everyone will find at least 10 improvements after checking with this services. Enjoy and Cheers!