Website Analysis Tools: 7 Powerful and Free Tools

What website analysis tools do you use for tracking your website performance?

Every so often we need to step back to review our website to see how it is performing and what improvements we can make.

Here are 7 website analytics tools that are useful and worth exploring. Most are free and some have a free component to them

1.  Analyze your website traffic with Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange provides a 7-day free trial that is worth checking out.  When you install the software it starts tracking visitors to your website, giving you an extreme close-up view of your website traffic.

You can monitor visitors in real-time, see what pages they are on, where they are navigating to, and even where their mouse movements are.

If you want you can interact with them while they are browsing by sending them a message. You know what country they are from and what pages they have viewed so you can strike up a conversation with them.

Every time you log into your Lucky Orange account, you can view how many people are on your website at that moment. The Dashboard gives you a snapshot of your website visitors’ locations, referrers, languages, and more. The big bonus is that you can filter all this data with behavior tags, or compare historical data.

Here are some other useful website analytics tools available:

• Heatmaps. If you want a close-up of user behavior on your site, there is a great heatmap functionality that lets you enter the URL of any page on your website.
• Form Analytics. This tool lets you see how many of your visitors viewed, engaged, abandoned, or converted on your website forms.
• Recordings. In addition, to live view of your visitors, you can also see the visitor recordings that includes data such as activity, pages viewed, time on page, landing and exit pages, location, browser, and device type.

Understanding your visitors is extremely important and signing up for the 7-day trial and testing this tool will help you with this.

2.  Understand the optimization of your site for Social Sharing

When someone shares content from your website to social channels there is additional information you can provide that is sent to the relevant platform to improve how the information is shared.

Is this the new SEO i.e. SMO (Social Media Optimization)?  I don’t know about that but it is certainly something worth considering.

Knowem.com has provided a useful Social Media Optimizer tool which analyzes your website for these tags. Just enter your website address and it will show you if your website is properly optimized for sharing on social media. If there are any issues, the tool will provide recommendations on how to fix them.

When someone shares your content on Twitter, an image and more information can be displayed about the links that are included in the tweet.

This means you have a better chance of the tweet standing out and getting more engagement e.g. link clicks. But, you first need to set up your Twitter Cards.

Let’s look at the analysis of razorsocial.com for Twitter’s Summary card data.

As you can see from the above screenshot, we’ve set up the summary text, title, and description. However, we can still improve this by including an image and creator code.

Here is an example of a tweet which contains Twitter card information (i.e. the tweet is expanded out):

Your developer can add this content manually or you can use some plugins.  For example, if you are on WordPress then you can use WordPress SEO plugin to add twitter card information.

3.  Check your Backlinks and Domain Authority using Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is one of the website analysis tools provided by the SEO company Moz. Its main purpose is to help you analyze your website’s complete backlink profile, but it also displays your site’s authority (how well your website is ranked) using a proprietary ranking system developed by Moz.

One key area is your website’s Domain Authority. This is a system for ranking your website on a scale from 1 to 100. The higher the number, the easier it is to rank for content that is relevant to services you provide.

So it’s important to know your domain authority. To increase your DA, you need to focus on getting links from other related sites in your industry that have a high domain authority score.

The image below shows the following:

• Domain Authority – Rating out of 100 for your domain
• Page Authority – Every page on your website is ranked out of 100 also.
• Page Link Metrics – This shows Just Discovered links to your site, Root Domains which is the number of unique websites that link back to your website, and the number of Total Links.

4.  Check your website on various browsers

There are so many different platforms and browsers you can’t assume that your website will work correctly on them all. Browserstack lets you pick a selection of browsers and platforms (over 1100 available) and displays a screenshot of what your website looks like on each of these platforms/browsers.

When you enter your website address there are 15 browsers already selected. You can continue your test using these browsers or select whatever you want to display.

5.  Check current ranking for keywords with SEMRush

SEMrush is a website analysis tool that can help you optimize your SEO strategy by understanding more about the keywords you currently rank for on Google.

The tool allows you to input a list of keywords or automatically add the keywords you rank for detected by SEMrush. You’ll get a detailed analysis report that can help you optimize your content for rankings.

SEMRush is also useful for checking out how difficult it’s going to be to rank for the keywords you want to target. You can do this by entering a keyword into the Keyword Difficulty Tool and you’ll get the difficulty score, volume of monthly searches, and the number of results for that keyword.

You can start with a free version of this website analytic tool which offers some limited but useful analytics features and later decide if you want to upgrade.

6.  Analyze your website with Neustar

Neustar provides a free website speed test that shows you the speed of downloading a page on your website from multiple locations around the world.

If you find that the download speeds are all very high you’ll need to start talking with your hosting provider or developer.  You may also find that it’s high for one location but not another. This would mean that you might need to consider a CDN (Content distribution network) which distributes your content around the globe.

7. Understand your website visitors using Hotjar

Hotjar is a tool that offers both user analytics and feedback functionality. It’s a well-rounded website analytics tool that packs a lot of powerful features, including:

• Heatmaps – shows you where users clicked or scrolled on your website
• Recordings – allows you to watch recordings of user behavior on your site based on user ID, device, or location
• Conversion funnels – lets you test your funnels to find opportunities for improvement
• Feedback polls – create polls and surveys to get insights from users before they leave your website

Analyzing your website with Hotjar helps you understand the behavior of your users so you can optimize your site accordingly.

The Basic plan is free, but it offers limited reporting. If you want to try out their Business plan, you can sign up for a 15-day free trial.

Bonus:  Check your website speed with GTMetrix

Speed is crucially important for user experience but also because it’s one of Google’s ranking factors.

GTMetrix gives you a percentage score based on the optimisation of your website and then you can see exactly where the issue lies.  For example, under the ‘Waterfall’ section you can see how long it takes to load each element.  Focus on the elements that take the longest to load and optimize these!

Summary of All Website Analysis Tools

It’s important to step back every so often and do an analysis of your website. Are you using any of the tools above? Are there any other tools you’re using that we didn’t mention?

As usual, we’d love to hear from you!!

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