Date First Published: 4th March 2023
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: Web Development
Article Type: Computer Questions & Answers
Difficulty: EasyDifficulty Level: 3/10
Learn about how to check a webpage for errors in this article.
Before you launch a webpage to the public, it is important to check it for errors. These can include SEO issues, HTML markup errors, broken links, compatibility issues, issues with viewing on mobile devices, a long page loading time, an inaccessible design, and other errors that can have a negative impact on the overall user experience. Manually checking your webpages for errors without any tools is a time-consuming process, especially for a large website that has thousands of pages. Below are 10 free tools that you can use to check a webpage for errors.
The W3C Markup Validation Service validates HTML markup for errors, such as missing closing tags, forgotten quotation marks, open elements stray end tags, duplicate IDs, and deprecated elements. After performing the checks, the validator will return with a list of errors and warnings. Sometimes, an error in a HTML document can cascade and cause more errors further down the document, making the validator report even more errors. If there are no errors or warnings, the W3C Markup Validation Service will return a success message that may say 'No errors or warnings to show'. HTML can be checked by direct input, copying and pasting the webpage URL, or uploading a HTML file. This validator is provided by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the organisation responsible for developing standards, guidelines, and protocols for the World Wide Web.
Before you publish a webpage, we recommend that you validate your HTML document using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Although errors in a HTML document will not cause the whole file to fail when processed for output as it does not have strict validation, making them harder to spot, the error will cause the specific element to stop working and the output might be different than expected, which is bad for user experience. This free tool can check a webpage for all of these errors and specify the line of the error so that you can fix them as soon as possible.
The W3C Markup Validation Service also provides a free CSS validator to check the validity of CSS files. It is called Jigsaw. Once the check has finished, it will return with a list of CSS errors so that you can find and fix them as soon as possible.
Nibbler checks to see how accessible, satisfying, well-marketed, and well-designed your website is. After performing the checks, it will give you an overall score from 0 to 10 and a complete overview of your website. The score is a decimal number. The things that Nibbler analyses include:
Nibbler is free to use, but there is a paid version of it, called Insites, that allows you to add your branding, perform competitor audits, supports connection with existing tools, and supports more than 20 languages. Nibbler allows you to run 17 free tests and after that, you will have to switch to their premium version to continue running tests.
Pingdom allows you to analyse the loading speed of a page by entering the URL. After the test has finished, you will get a performance grade number and information about the page size, load time, and the total number of requests. It will also provide you with tips on how to improve the speed of your page, such as reducing the number of DNS lookups. Pingdom is free to use, but if you want a monitoring tool or more data, you will have to choose one of their paid plans.
Pingdom also has a feature to choose different locations around the world to test websites from to test the page loading speed in different locations. For example, if a website was based in the United Kingdom and a client device communicated and made a request to the server from the United States, the page loading speed would be slower than someone in the same country as the requests would have to travel across the Atlantic Ocean.
PageSpeed Insights is a tool offered by Google that allows you to analyse the loading speed, accessibility, and SEO of your webpage by entering the URL. Once finished, it will provide an overview of your website and opportunities on how to improve the loading speed, accessibility, and overall user experience. It provides a report for both desktop and mobile versions. PageSpeed Insights is a completely free tool that does not require you to have a Google account.
PageSpeed Insights analyses the quality of user experience in three main categories: Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor. Google has thresholds for different measurements of page speed to meet the three categories and they are set in line with the Core Web Vitals initiative.
PowerMapper checks websites for broken links, browser compatibility, search engine issues, usability, accessibility, and web standards validation. Once the test has finished, it will return with an overall quality score for each category and list the issues it found. This tool is free to use, but it only tests up to 10 pages and images. To test your site, you will need to enter the address and then click on 'test site'.
Dead Link Checker will check your website for broken links that point to pages that return with errors or do not exist. You can choose to scan a single page or your whole website. Once the scan has finished, it will show a list of broken links and give a progress bar that shows the percentage of broken links to active links. This tool makes it easy to identify any broken links and is useful for large websites as manually checking pages to ensure that you haven't broken any links is a time-consuming process.
GTMetrix tests a webpage for speed and how fast it loads. After the URL has been analysed, it will generate a report that contains the total page size, total page requests, and an overall grade that considers all the factors it analysed in relation to website speed. This includes web vitals (largest content element, total blocking time, cumulative layout shift). It will provide tips on how to improve the speed of a page (e.g. properly sizing images) and list the top issues that slow down the loading time first.
mobiReady analyses a webpage to see how well it works on mobile devices. After the test has finished, it will show how your webpage looks on smartphones along with factors that slow the page loading time down the most and how to fix these issues.
mobiReady also has a feature that shows how a webpage ranks against the distribution of scores of the top 1000 Alexa sites as measured by mobiReady. This is measured by the score that it gives a website out of 5 based on all the factors that it analysed, such as page weight, alt attributes, cookie size, viewport meta, valid markup, JavaScript placement, DNS lookups, internal CSS directives, and more.
Seobility analyses your website and gives tips on optimising it to improve performance in search engines. It allows you to perform up to 3 checks per day. It can detect technical errors and on-page SEO issues that can have a negative impact on search engine rankings along with external factors, such as blacklists, backlinks, and social media and server configuration issues. After the scan has finished, you will get a detailed overview of your website with a list of tips for improving SEO, page loading time, list of most important keywords, link structure, page structure, media list, and overall page and content quality.
This tool is completely free and does not require you to create an account, but you can test up to 1000 pages of your website and have an automated check for keyword optimisation with a free account.
SEO Site Checkup runs a fast audit of your website and you can check up to 1 website per day. If you want to check more than 1 website per day, you can create a free account. After the test has finished, it will provide a detailed analysis summary, which contains a list of issues to fix with their priority and any issues in regard to page loading time, server and security, mobile usability, and advanced SEO.
This free tool comes with a large number of tests, including a meta title test, meta description test, Google search results preview test, Social media meta tags test, keywords usage test, keywords cloud test, sitemap test, responsive image test, and more. Some tests, such as competitor domains test, broken links test, and backlinks test are only available to registered users.
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