Whenever you’re assessing your website, there are online tools that can make the task easier and more manageable. Luckily, there are website Optimizer Tools that are user-friendly, functional, and affordable.

We won’t go through the nifty details of the website assessment because we’ve gone through that already. What we will discuss are the tools that you should (and shouldn’t) use when optimizing your website.

Website optimizer tools are different from each other. Some are focused on the on-page SEO while other tools are capable of recording the user experience of your visitor.

These tools should be able to optimize such parameters:

• SEO
• User Engagement
• Website design
• Page loading speed

Some tools and plugins can worsen the case instead of optimizing your website. Optimizing your website can be challenging if you have no idea what tools to use.

Thus, we will list down the best tools for optimizing different aspects of your website. Along with this list is a shortlist of the worst website optimizer tools and plugins that can harm your website. As long as you stray away from the worst ones, you can optimize your website and rank it on search engines.

List of Best Website Optimizer Tools

1. GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a free powerful tool used to assess the performance and structure of your website. It gives a good insight into your page loading speed, first contentful paint, and other issues that need some attention. And since these factors affect the overall performance of your website, this tool also tells you what to do about these unresolved issues.

All you have to do is plug in your domain on the tool, and it will give you results within seconds. The tool will analyze your website and give recommendations to fix your website. This data will help you increase your page load speed and reduce your bounce rate.

2. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google to help you optimize your page load speed. This tool analyzes your page’s content and gives suggestions to improve its loading speed and performance.

This tool reflects the Core Web Vitals needed to help your website rank on SERPs. These parameters are:

• First Input Delay (FID) to measure the interactivity.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) to measure the load speed.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to measure visual stability.

These parameters are measured by Google PageSpeed Insights and shown as percentages. A green circle indicates that the parameter is good while a red triangle means that it’s an issue.

The tool even gives opportunities for you to improve your site. It gives estimated time savings for each opportunity that you resolve.

3. Google Search Console

If you’re a veteran in the industry, you probably know this tool as the Google Webmaster Tools. Google Search Console is a good tool to measure if your website is performing well in terms of SEO. It can also help you check your Google ranking and monitor it.

4. Ahrefs

You can do a quick site audit using Ahrefs Site Audit tool and check your website’s health score. You can also check the on-page SEO performance of your site using this tool. It’s a popular and useful tool to have for your website’s SEO maintenance.

Here are the SEO metrics you can get from Ahrefs:

• On-page SEO report
• Backlink profile
• Keyword usage
• SERP ranking

5. HotJar

HotJar is a good way to track your user engagement through heatmaps. Heatmaps allow you to see the mouse movement of a visitor and see what elements catch their attention and what they ignore.

Their Behavior Analytics tool helps you understand the intent of the visitors on your website and how they experience it. It gives you a whole new perspective on how you see your website.

6. UserTesting

If you want to see how the public reacts to your website, you should test it using UserTesting. This tool allows you to get insights from random test audiences and see how they react to your website. This tool will help you optimize your website and maximize the user experience.

If you’re concerned about the user experience or just looking for feedback for your new site design, UserTesting will help with your problem.

7. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is an application that lets you crawl your website using their Screaming Frog spider. It can find broken links, duplicate content, and other critical issues on your website. You can optimize your website using the recommendations given by the Screaming Frog tool.

The tool has a free version which works well for website optimization. If you want to have access to the tool’s full capabilities, you have to subscribe to their paid version.

8. HubSpot Website Grader

HubSpot’s Website Grader tool gives a summary of your website’s score based on its parameters. You can get this generic result in the free version, but there are more features if you subscribe to their paid option. You can gauge your website’s performance based on these parameters.

• Site performance
• SEO
• Mobile usability
• Security

They also offer free website optimization courses to guide you when using their tool. The Website Grader tool can also check your page speed and HTTP requests on your website to improve the page load speed.

9. CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is one of the great website optimizer tools to use if you want to know how users interact with your website. It gives a detailed description of how users move around your website. You can observe user behavior and improve your website design based on the data gathered.

All you have to do is to sign up on CrazyEgg and you can start collecting user behavior reports from this tool. You will see which element on your website gets the most interaction from your visitors. It works like a heatmap, so the data you gather is real-time and legitimate.

10. WebPageTest

Last (but not least) is the WebPageTest tool from Catchpoint. It gives you an overview of certain parameters to check your website’s performance. Such parameters are:

• Website security score
• Image compression
• Cached static content
• Page load speed

It also shows the Core Web Vitals that can be used to improve your website’s performance. Optimizing your website using the WebPageTest tool will make your task easier and better.

Some WordPress Plugins for Website Optimization

• Autoptimize – Autoptimize plugin for WordPress will make optimizing your site easier. This plugin can optimize and improve your WordPress website’s performance in a few clicks.
• Smush Image Optimizer – Smush is a WordPress plugin that can optimize and compress the images you upload on the website. You can increase your website’s loading speed if you optimize your images.
• Rank Math SEO – this plugin is famous for webmasters that need to optimize their SEO and gain traction in their niche. Rank Math SEO comes with powerful SEO features to rank your website on SERPs.
• SEOPress – SEOPress is one of the simplest SEO plugins that packs a punch. This plugin can make a schema, HTML and XML Sitemaps, and other on-page SEO aspects of your website.

Some of the Worst Website Optimizer Tools

• Web.com – This tool has been receiving bad reviews on Trustpilot because of the bad customer service it provides. The tool also encounters several bugs and malfunctions that users report.
• Theme Check WP Plugin – Theme Check is a tool to check the theme of your web design. However, the tool is reportedly giving faulty and skewed results, making it a waste of money. Needless to say, some other tools and plugins perform much better than Theme Check.
• EWWW Image Optimizer – EWWW Image Optimizer plugin received a couple of bad reviews because the plugin charges you without any consent. The tool is functional, but other image optimizer tools work better than this plugin.

Optimize!

These are 10 of the best tools you can use to optimize your website’s performance. Each tool targets different aspects of your website. Some tools can show you how users interact with your website, while other tools tackle the SEO aspect of your website.

You can use multiple website optimizer tools to improve user experience even further. However, there are tools that you’d want to avoid. Stick to the ones on the list and always remember to check the reviews for the tool of your choice.