Essential tools for website building

Building, maintaining, and publishing content on my website can become a chore if not done properly. I believe consistency is key so here are some free tools that have helped me greatly in maintaining a good website building best practices.

6 essential tools for building a website

1. Schema Markup Validator
2. Google Rich Results Test
3. PageSpeed Insights
4. Google Search Console
5. Tiny PNG
6. Repository of valid schemas on Google Docs

Schema Markup Validator

The Schema Markup Validator is a free tool designed to help website developers ensure their website's structured data markup is implemented correctly. As the name suggests, it checks your website's code for errors and inconsistencies in the Schema.org markup formats such as JSON-LD, and ensures search engines can properly understand the meaning and context of your website.

Google Rich Results Test

The Google Rich Results Test helps website owners see how their web pages might appear in search results with rich results. How it works is that it analyses your webpage for any structured data markup and based on the type of markup present, the tool tells you if your page is eligible for rich results. Aside from that, it scans for any errors or warnings in your structured data so that you can fix them and improve your chances of getting richer search results.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is a free tool offered by Google that helps website developers analyse the performance and speed of their web pages. It provides valuable insights into how fast a webpage loads on desktop and mobile and offers suggestions for improvement.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) helps website owners understand and improve how their website appears in Google Search results. It's like having a behind-the-scenes look at how Google sees your website. With GSC, you can see your website's impressions and clicks, identify technical issues that prevent proper indexing, submit sitemaps to help with the indexing process, and analyse search traffic to identify areas for improvement in your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts.

Tiny PNG

Tiny PNG is a Webp, PNG, and jpeg image compressing tool that is particularly useful for websites where faster loading times are crucial. Even though Konigle auto-converts all uploaded images into Webp format, sometimes these images just need a little help in further compression.

Repository of valid schemas on Google Docs

Lastly, I keep a repository of valid JSON-LD schemas that I have created for past pages. Most of the schema markups can be used interchangeably after tweaking information in the content, so keeping a repository will help speed the whole process when new pages are added to my website.