Free website tools and goodies
The free website tools we would hand a friend who runs a small business website: a website speed test, an SEO check, accessibility and design tools, and where to find the fonts, images and colours you need. All of it free, most of it useful within ten minutes.
Start here: run a free website audit
Our free website audit tool reads your real website speed, SEO, accessibility, design and content, then tells you what to fix first. It is the fastest way to find out which of the tools below you actually need.
Speed & Core Web Vitals
A free website speed test, so you can find out what is slowing your site down and fix the files that cause most of it.
PageSpeed Insights
Google's own test. Look past the lab score at the field data, which is what real visitors actually experienced over the last 28 days.
Squoosh
Compress and resize images in your browser with a live before and after preview. Files never leave your device.
TinyPNG
Drop in PNG and JPEG files and get much smaller versions back with no visible loss of quality.
Cloudflare
A free content delivery layer that caches your pages close to your visitors and serves them over a faster connection.
SEO check & visibility
Run an SEO check on your own pages: see what people search to find you, how search engines read your site, and where your keyword research should point.
Google Search Console
The single most useful free tool for a website owner. Shows the searches that bring people to you, which pages are indexed, and what is broken.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Worth the ten minutes. Several AI assistants draw on Bing's index, so it is a second route into being quoted.
Rich Results Test
Checks that the structured information search engines read from your page is valid and eligible to be shown.
Schema Markup Validator
A second, stricter checker for the same structured information. Useful when the first one passes but something still looks wrong.
Website design & assets
Free fonts, photography, colour palettes and icons licensed for commercial use, so a small business website can look professional without a design budget.
Google Fonts
Thousands of licensed typefaces you can use on a commercial site for nothing. Check the loading impact before you add a third one.
Unsplash
High-quality photography, free to use and no attribution required. Resize anything you download before you publish it.
Coolors
Generate a palette quickly, lock the colours you like, and check the contrast ratio between any two of them before you commit.
unDraw
Open-source illustrations you can recolour to match your brand, which is a fast way to add life to a text-heavy page.
Lucide
A clean, consistent set of open-source icons. Using one icon library everywhere reads far more finished than mixing three.
Figma
The free tier is enough to design a whole website and share it with somebody for comment before a line of code is written.
Accessibility & quality
These catch the problems that quietly cost you visitors, and they are fast to run.
WAVE
Paste a URL and get a visual report of the accessibility problems on that page, marked directly on a picture of your site.
WebAIM Contrast Checker
Enter any text and background colour and see instantly whether it passes the contrast minimums. Two-minute fixes with real effect.
W3C Markup Validator
Checks your HTML is structurally sound. Broken markup confuses screen readers and search crawlers in the same way.
Learning & reference
Free, well-written references. These are where to look when you want the real answer.
MDN Web Docs
The reference for how the web actually works. Reliable enough to settle most arguments about what a browser does.
web.dev
Google's practical guidance on performance, accessibility and search, written for people building real sites rather than for theory.
Google Search Central
The official documentation on how Google crawls, indexes and ranks pages. The shortest path out of search-engine folklore.
The 25-point website health checklist
Work down the list once and you will have covered the problems that cost most sites the most visitors.
Content & clarity
- One clear headline that a stranger understands immediately
- The headline describes the visitor's problem, not your company
- A separate page per topic instead of one page covering everything
- Real text in the page, not text baked into images
- A clear next step at the end of every page
Speed
- Images correctly sized and served in a modern format
- Fonts preloaded, with a swap strategy so text appears fast
- Third-party scripts audited, and removed where they earn nothing
- JavaScript split so each page loads only what it needs
- Field data checked, not just a good lab score
Search visibility
- Every page has its own descriptive title
- Each page carries a one-sentence summary of what it covers
- Business name, address and contact details identical everywhere
- Structured information validates in Google's testing tools
- Site submitted to Search Console so you can see what is indexed
Mobile & accessibility
- Tested on a real phone, not a resized browser window
- Tap targets comfortable for a thumb
- Text contrast passes the minimum against its background
- Every form field has a visible label, not just placeholder text
- Focus states visible when tabbing through the page
Conversion & trust
- One primary action per page
- Proof placed next to the decision, not on a separate page
- Contact details easy to find from any page
- Forms ask for the minimum needed
- A visible privacy policy and clear terms
Want the thinking behind the checklist?
Read our articles
