If you’re in business, whether it’s for profit or nonprofit, chances are nearly 100% that you have a website to maintain. The good news is that there are some excellent free services available to help you. Two knowledgeable experts, WordPress specialist Kevin Lewis (klworks.net) and Honolulu cybersecurity guru Attila Seress (cylanda.com), recommend the following sites that will enable your digital content management.
One of my favorites is grader.com, which will evaluate any website based on performance (loading speed), search engine optimization (SEO), optimization for mobile devices and security. Created by a respected marketing firm, HubSpot, the app “scores” your site and offers advice on how to tweak it for optimal performance. This entails a “What do I do next?” section with specific tips. Most of the advice is straightforward, such as “Lighten your pages by removing or compressing heavy content,” but other comments can be cryptic. When it suggested using a “minifier tool” to ensure my JavaScript is “minified,” my eyes glazed over. That said, they offer a free online “Academy” with video tutorials. The 15-minute video I viewed, “Enhancing a Website’s SEO,” was very useful.
Another excellent site that rates your website optimization is gtmetrix.com, which tests page load rate, video capture and the speed of web pages from multiple locations around the world. Its user interface is straightforward and well documented. It gives a complete analysis and detailed report of the site performance. The documentation is good but it’s very technical.
As alluded to in the previous recommendation from Grader.com, bloated images are a “no-no.” That’s where the free photo compression tool from (compressor.io) can help your webpage load faster and improve SEO. Optimizing your art can be done without sacrificing quality. This app is easy to use. Just download the image and it will compress automatically. I tried several jpegs and averaged about a 60% diminishment in size. For example, a 6.58 MB image was whittled down to 2.28 MB.
Broken links are an anathema to SEO, not to mention your reputation. If visitors to your site can’t find what they are looking for because of a busted link, they will roll their eyes, possibly curse and go elsewhere. To check your site, just go to brokenlinkcheck.com. This tool will show you exactly where those inoperative hyperlinks are so that you can fix them.
Bloggers or content developers always need good art or eye candy, as we say. However, you can’t simply copy someone else’s copyrighted material (as I explained in my June 21 column). So, what to do? Free (open source) images or videos to spice up your blogs are available on sites such as Wikipedia, but to get more “commercial” images, Pexels (pexels.com) is a winner. What’s more, you can modify its art to your heart’s content.
If you have an excruciatingly long URL that you would like to shorten and/or customize, I suggest visiting bitly.com. What’s the point? You can brand your links, incorporate them into your collateral and make them more memorable. For example, https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2022/ 02/10/amtrak- deal-valentines-offer-sale/6741296001/ can be compressed into bit.ly/amtrak- valentines.
Tired of emails from spammers, scammers and even cybercriminals? Mxtoolbox.com is a quick and easy-to-use site that allows you to check whether your .com’s email is set up correctly. Correctly configured DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) records for your domain name greatly reduce the chance that bad emails will make their way into your employees’ inboxes.
If your client newsletters or email pitches are getting dumped into spam folders, help is on the way. Before sending out that next pitch, go to mail-tester.com and send over a test email to it. It will let you know whether it’s safe to send and, if not, how to fix it so that you’ll get it delivered correctly.
Do you have any favorite hacks-to-maintain websites? Feel free to contact me.
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Rob Kay, a Honolulu-based writer, covers technology and sustainability for Tech View and is the creator of fijiguide.com. An EWC alumnus, he can be reached at Robertfredkay@gmail.com.
