Tools And Plugins I Like

Last Update: 3/19/2020

.htaccess tester – Test your file for errors and issues.

301/302 Redirect Checker – A quick way to check a redirect to see what type it is.

Bit.ly – Shorten URLs and track the clicks.

BrightLocal Search Results Checker – Check international search results from any location – do in incognito mode.

Character Count Online – Counts characters live as you type them. I like to use stuff like this when writing metadata, social markup, and other things that need a specific count.

Colorblind: Dalton For Google Chrome – Test out a website to see how it works for various forms of colorblindness.

Convertkit – Great for email nurture campaigns.

Epic Privacy Browser –  Browser with an on/off toggle to enable a proxy and hide the IP address.

Facebook Ad Library – See what ads are running for specific Facebook pages.

Facebook Debugger – Important to run between refreshes when experimenting with OG data

FindThat.email – Find e-mail addresses that would otherwise be hard to key in on.

Google Campaigns URL Builder – Super easy to use, and invaluable in helping you track the success of campaigns.

Google Keyword Planner – The remaining way to do keyword research straight from the source.

Google Rich Results Spam Reporter – I’ll need it someday, I’m sure.

Google Search Operators – A solid list of Google’s search operators.

Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool – Easily write titles and descriptions, and enter URLs while staying within character count.

Google SERP Title Tag Optimization Tool – MOZ’s updated tool for title tags.

Google’s Structured Data Helper – Looks like a pretty cool thing to check out. I usually make mine by hand, the hard way.

Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool – Great for seeing if structured data and/or Authorship is set up properly.

Google Trends – Find out what keywords are trending online.

GroupHigh – If you can afford it, it’s fantastic for finding influencers and guest blog opportunities.

GTMatrix – Solid speed testing tool for websites.

HEIC to JPG Converter – Because it looks like Photoshop doesn’t support HEIC images yet, and they’re not going away.

How Search Works – A virtual playground of SEO exploration I intend to visit more often.

How To Make YouTube Videos Louder – Just a little bit of script that I find incredibly useful, and how to set it up. Works with most other videos too.

Invision – Great for UX/Design collaboration

JSON-LD Generator – It’s a good start, but I’d tweak from there.

JSON-LD Google Tag Manager Fix Generator – I haven’t tried this yet, but it looks like a lifesaver.

LatLong.net – Get the exact latitude and longitude of places.

Lucky Orange – My preferred tool for UX/CRO testing.

Merkle Schema Markup Generator – Handy as a walkthrough

MobileTest.me – Test how your website looks in several leading mobile devices.

Mobile Friendly Test – Google Developer Tool to test mobile compatibility and get helpful suggestions.

MonkeyTest.it – Run a troubleshooting check of a given web page.

Omnicalculator – Does the math so I don’t have to be anxious about being wrong about it.

Online Chart Tool – This is an neat free chart tool I formerly used to create visuals when building SEO site evaluations.

Online HTML Source Code Viewer – Think you have issues with your cache, and need to see the code fast? Try this tool.

RankRanger Schema Markup Generator – Also a nice walkthrough for creating JSON-LD

Regex Checker – Test out whether your regular expressions work properly. Refereed to me by the lovely fellow dragon Jannette.

SchemaAPP Schema.Org Generator – I’ll probably continue to do these by hand myself, but this is a cool way to make one if you’re new.

SilverPop’s 2013 E-mail Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study – An absolute wealth of data on e-mail marketing, conversions, and demographics.

Squoosh – Google’s image optimization tool

The Old Reader – My RSS Reader

Tweet Binder – Find out traffic volume estimates while doing hashtag research.

Video Rich Snipper Generator By Sistrix – Great for populating schema into videos. Sadly, now only available in German.

WaybackPack – Download the entire Wayback Machine archive for a given URL.

WebPage Test – A handy tool to find various website page speed metrics.

What CMS Is This? – Quickly scan a site and identify its CMS platform.

What Does My Site Cost? – Find out how much your site would cost, datawise, to run. Sorted by country.

Chrome Plugins

CMS Detect – Find out what CMS the site you’re on is using with a single click.

Let Me Out – You know those scam/spam ads that trap you in an infinite dialog loop, where you have to close your browser to escape? This makes that impossible.

Redirect Path – Find out what’s happening in your page redirects. Super useful.

SelectorGadget – Really helpful in isolating CSS elements when you’re trying to track stuff in GTM.

Siteimprove Accessibility Checker – Helps with ADA compliance.

Tag Assistant – A bread and butter plugin. Find out if GA, GTM, adwords, and other tags are running on the site.

View Background Image – It adds “View Background Image” to the right-click menu. Super handy.

View Image Info – Handy, faster way to see image sizes without diving into developer tools.

View Rendered Source – See how the rendered source code compares to the original.

WordPress Plugins

AWRStudyr: Learn various back-end insights on a website you’re viewing.

Image Pro:  Automatically resize images on the fly.  No gigantic images that only look small anymore.

No Image Link: Works out of the box. Stops images from linking to themselves.

Open External Links In A New Window – No fuss, no muss. Easy to install, and does exactly what it says. Great for UX, and keeping people on the site.

sh404SEF – I’ve had good experiences with this one so far for Joomla.

Sound Booster – Make tabs on Chrome up to 500% louder.

WP Force Lowercase URLs: Enforce URL parameters.

WP Site Mapping: A super easy to use HTML sitemap generator, albeit a little quick and dirty, and slow to load.

Yuzo – A great related posts plugin.