Free Tools Every Website Owner Should Know About

There are so many resources on the web today that make it more easy than ever to build, optimize, maintain, monetize, and promote a website. And given that most of the best tools are completely free, there is no excuse for not using them.

We’ve listed a few of our favorites, as well as some other popular tools, to help you in your website endeavors.

Google Products: Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, and Webmaster Tools

Unlike other large search engines (cough… Yahoo), Google provides a wide variety of tools for webmasters and makes it easy for you to promote your site, make money from your site, analyze statistic, and submit your site to its index.

Google Analytics

Google offers one of the most complete statistic packages with both basic and advanced options. For the average website, it provides comprehensive statistics to analyze traffic in terms of visitor location, visitor hardware, visitor operating system, and visitor browser. Additionally, you can track how visitors found your website, be it through search engines, direct access, or referring sites. And best of all, you can easily sort data.

If you are not already using this, sign up today! Its what we use to analyze our website statistics..

AdWords and AdSense

These two products enable you to promote and monetize your site.

But, beware. AdWords campaigns can be costly if you do not choose the right keywords. However, the platform is very user friendly and is highly recommended by Velvet Blues. Be sure to read Google’s documentation so that you can get the most out of your advertising campaigns.

On the other hand, AdSense enables you to easily make money from your site. When you add AdSense code to your website, Google will server targeted textual or image ads, depending on your settings. You generate revenue whenever someone clicks on the ads.

Webmaster Tools

Even if you refuse to use any other Google products, it is imperative that you use this tool. This tool will help you to monitor, maintain, and even improve, your placement in Google. Additionally, it will tell you other key factors, such as how often Google visits your site, as well as how many pages are indexed. 

Affiliate Marketing

Another way to make money from your website is to be an affiliate marketer. If you’ve done a lot of web surfing, you’ve probably noticed an affiliates link at the bottom of a few sites. This link usually directs publishers to a page discussing the details of that company’s affiliate program. Yes, a lot of websites use affiliate marketing to generate sales. However, if you plan to sign up for affiliate accounts with multiple different companies, you will have to deal with the hassle of remembering multiple pairs of login credentials, managing multiple accounts, and dealing with multiple payment thresholds.

Fortunately, there is a more efficient way. There are large companies which enable you to undergo only one application process. Upon approval, you are granted access to their system and given the ability to select companies and obtain ads, all through one interface. They also have detailed tracking and reports which are updated hourly. Two companies which we use are CJ and LinkShare. These are the biggest companies in the business.

Beware of any company which requires you to pay money to sign up for their affiliate program.

Browser Shots

Ever wanted to know what your site looks like to visitors using different browser or operating systems than you? BrowserShots.org is the way to go. You can choose over 50 different browser/platform combinations. And its completely free. 

W3C Markup Validators: HTML and CSS

Did you know, search engine rankings could be negatively affected by having invalid markup on your pages. Fortunately, there are free markup validators that recognize invalid HTML and CSS, as well as give you suggestions on fixing it. w3.org provides these validators. For the HTML validator, go to validator.w3.org. And the CSS validator can be found at jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/. W3C has a variety of other tools that can be found on their Tools Home Page.

Website Performance Analyzer from WebSiteOptimization.com

If you have a slow loading page, or are just curious as to how long it might take for visitors to load your website’s pages, definitely use this tool. In addition to providing load time, it actually analyzes your website and helps you to pinpoint areas that can be optimized to decrease load time.

Open Source Software

If you don’t know what open source is, then please get a pencil and start taking notes. Open source software is freely available software applications that you can use and modify to suit your needs. In other words, open source is your way to minimize development costs and have a fully-featured website in no time.

Some popular open sources packages are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, PHPBB, Typo3, and ZenCart. And all of these packages have extensive documentation and tutorials to enable you to build your own advanced website yourself.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of great tools out there. So when you are planning your next website or thinking about improving an existing one, do your research. And no matter what you are looking to achieve, there is probably a free tool that can help you do it.