30 website optimization tools and how they help you build a high-converting site

Iterating new (and better) versions of your website as user expectations and the competitive landscape evolve is the most impactful way to attract more visitors and increase conversions. 

Think of it as taking your site to the next level: you’ve already put in the hard work to build a website. Now, it’s time to optimize what’s already there to stay ahead of the competition and your audience's expectations.

Whether you’re at the start of your optimization journey or looking to up your game, this guide gives you

• The top 7 free website optimization tools to try right now

• Page speed optimization tools

• SEO optimization tools

• UX website optimization tools

• CRO optimization tools

• Mobile-first optimization tools

Top 7 free website optimization tools to try right now

For a list of our top picks of free tools, keep reading. Or, jump to a comprehensive breakdown of the six different categories of web optimization tools to first determine which type of tool you need.

1. PageSpeed Insights

• What it is: created by Google, PageSpeed Insights is a simple, free website speed checker

• What you can optimize: website page speed, desktop website performance, and mobile page speed

• How to use it: enter any URL and click 'Analyze'. PageSpeed Insights will return a page speed score out of 100 and give suggestions on how to make your site load faster.

2. Contentsquare

• What it is: Contentsquare (that's us! 👋) is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform that gives website owners a holistic view of their users, including their behavior, motivations, frustrations, and feedback 

• What you can optimize: just about everything! Find and fix bugs, test your page speed, optimize page design for conversion rate, and improve UX with tools like Heatmaps, Session Replays, Surveys, and Interviews.

• How to use it: sign up and add the Contentsquare tracking code to your site to start recording session replays and generating heatmaps. You can use the Free plan for sites with up to 5k monthly sessions. 

🤝 Your one-stop shop for website optimization insights

Contentsquare’s tools and features work in harmony to give you customer-centric insights at both the quantitative and qualitative level, with quick and easy ways to jump between the two.

If you’re on the Free tier, use dashboards to track your basic web analytics—things like conversion rate, bounce rate and traffic—then use Heatmaps to get insights into the user behavior behind your numbers. 

For example, if your dashboard reveals that conversions have decreased on a product page, you might examine a rage click map for that page. In this type of heatmap, ‘hot’ areas are ones where users often click repeatedly. You might spot that users are frequently rage-clicking a CTA, indicating that it isn’t working. In that case, optimizing the page might be as simple as fixing the CTA.

3. Google Search Console (GSC)

• What it is: Search Console is a free search optimization tool from Google

• What you can optimize: measure SEO performance, view keyword impressions and clicks, see your backlinks, and check for crawling and speed errors

• How to use it: sign in with your Google account, verify site ownership, and wait for data to be collected

4. Screaming Frog

• What it is: Screaming Frog is website crawling software for PC, Mac, or Linux

• What you can optimize: on-page and technical SEO—find broken links, check HTML and XML sitemaps, find duplicate content, check redirects, and analyze page titles and meta descriptions

• How to use it: download Screaming Frog and enter a URL or sitemap to start crawling

5. Optimizely

• What it is: Optimizely is a powerful web experimentation platform providing A/B testing and multivariate testing tools and website personalization

• What you can optimize: use A/B testing, split testing, and multivariate testing (MVT) to test variations of different web pages and measure how they perform

• How to use it: sign up for an account and add a snippet of JavaScript code to your site to start running experiments

💭 Did you know? Contentsquare integrates with Optimizely (and other experimentation tools) to automatically detect when your site visitors interact with an experiment control or variation page.  You can filter your Contentsquare session replays and heatmaps by Optimizely variant ID to see how visitors click, move, and scroll on each version, and how they respond to it.

6. GTmetrix

• What it is: GTmetrix is a web page speed tool

• What you can optimize: page load speed

• How to use it: enter any URL and click 'Test your site' for a basic speed test. Then, click the drop-down menu on each recommendation to learn how to make your page load faster.

7. WAVE

• What it is: WAVE is a web accessibility evaluation tool

• What you can optimize: find accessibility issues like missing alt text, small text size, and contrast errors that make your content inaccessible to screen readers

• How to use it: enter any URL and click through the icon-coded errors to see what to change and learn why improved accessibility is important

6 types of website optimization tools

The seven tools we listed above prove you don’t need to spend money to start optimizing your website.

But if you want to go deeper into optimizing a specific area of your website—for example, making a landing page load faster or finding a new keyword for a blog post—here’s a look at the different types of web optimization you can focus on, and more tools that will help you get the job done.

Broadly, most web optimization tools fall into six main categories:

1. Page speed

2. Search engine optimization (SEO)

3. User experience (UX)

4. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

5. Mobile-first

6. Accessibility

Some tools help you work on more than one area at once—for example, Contentsquare can be used to improve UX and conversion rates on desktop and mobile—but in general, you’ll need to use multiple tools to optimize your entire website.

Think of it as one big optimization ecosystem: if you improve your website speed, you also impact your SEO, UX, and CRO efforts. As long as your mindset is focused on improving your website, you’ll get a lot out of the tools we discuss below.

1. Web page speed tools

A slow website can drive users away and hurt search rankings. Web page speed tools aren’t going to fix your slow site on their own, but they will measure page speed and show you what’s slowing it down. You’ll be able to pinpoint how to improve page load times by following recommendations like

• Reducing and compressing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images

• Caching content

• Using faster-hosting servers

Popular website speed optimization tools

• Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis tool 

• Pingdom

• WebPageTest

• Lighthouse

🚀 Using Contentsquare? You already have a web page speed tool. Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis feature allows you to test how quickly your website performs to users in different geographic locations. It runs in the background, automatically monitoring how key pages perform so you can catch any speed issues before they start to impact users. If any of your pages are loading slowly, Speed Analysis will not only inform you but also provide suggestions for improving their performance.

2. SEO tools

SEO helps you get more free website traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. There are many different types of SEO tools that help you do everything from optimizing the structure of your web pages to tracking how you rank for certain keywords. These include

• Technical SEO tools to audit on-page SEO (like checking meta robots tags or 404 links)

• Keyword research tools to find keyword ideas

• Rank tracking tools to measure and compare search traffic, and tell you how your site ranks in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for target keywords

• Content optimization tools to optimize for target keywords

• Backlink analysis tools to check which pages link to your site (or to competitors)

• Video SEO tools to optimize your videos to rank highly on video search engines like YouTube

You can use specialist SEO tools that only do one thing (for example, Screaming Frog is a dedicated technical SEO tool), and all-in-one SEO tools, like Ahrefs, which do a little of everything.

Popular SEO tools

• Bing Webmaster Tools

• Ahrefs

• Moz

• Semrush

• Clearscope

• Yoast SEO

• Google Trends

3. UX optimization tools

Great UX keeps visitors happy and reduces friction on your site, ultimately leading to better conversions and increased revenue.

UX optimization tools won't magically improve your user experience, but usability testing will help you understand user behavior and diagnose problems so you can optimize pages and give people what they need to keep browsing and buying from your site.

UX tools help with each step of the website and page optimization journey, from spotting where users get stuck to conducting user research.

Popular UX optimization tools

• UserTesting

• TryMyUI

• UsabilityHub

• Adobe Analytics

💡 Pro tip: Contentsquare gives you everything you need to understand your users’ behavior on your site and optimize for the best UX possible, thanks to tools like 

• Session Replay: watch anonymous video-style replays of your users’ cursors as they move through your site, allowing you to see exactly what they saw. To use them to improve your site’s UX, you could identify a page with a high bounce rate and watch some replays. You might observe that users don’t seem to be finding the information they’re looking for on this page, and decide to redesign it.

• Impact Quantification: a tool that helps you size the impact of any technical and non-technical errors that appear on your site. It provides a dashboard with key data on your bugs, counting things like how many times a particular error occurred, which page it occurred on, and how frustrated it made users. Use it to triage errors as they come up, focusing your efforts on fixing the ones that most significantly impact UX. 

• Frustration Score: Contentsquare evaluates sessions based on signs of friction—that is, when users do things like rage click or repeatedly attempt to fill in the same form. With frustration score data, you can see which pages and elements on your site most need UX optimization.

4. CRO tools

When done right, CRO increases the number of website visitors who become customers (or perform any desired action on your site).

There’s no single tool that improves conversion rate but with a combination of

• Traditional analytics (tools like Google Analytics or the product analytics features in Contentsquare)

• Behavior analytics software (tools like Contentsquare’s Heatmaps, Session Replays, and Surveys)

• Testing tools (like Omniconvert)

You’ll get a full picture of what’s happening on your site so you can give people what they need to convert.

Popular CRO tools

• Google Analytics

• Matomo

• VWO

• AB Tasty

📢 Pro tip: If you’re looking to boost your conversion rate, Contentsquare’s suite of tools combines quantitative data (what’s my conversion rate on this page?) and quantitative data (how are users behaving on this page in the moments before conversion?).

For example, you could: 

• Use dashboards to monitor your conversion data. If you see that the conversions for a particular page have dropped, you might click through to watch session replays of users interacting with that page. If something on the page has changed—a UX issue has cropped up or a link has broken—you’ll be able to spot it immediately, fix it, and watch your conversion rate return to normal.   

• Use Journey Analysis to see the paths users usually take to conversion and the pages they’re most likely to drop off of. This helps you identify the points in the customer journey that seem to be putting users off their conversion goals. If there’s a page with a particularly high drop-off rate, for example, you can click through to watch session replays of how users behave on it. You might discover they’re getting stuck with a broken CTA or confusing information—in other words, you may find that there’s a simple design fix that would boost your conversions.

5. Mobile optimization tools

More people browse websites on mobile than desktop, so mobile-first optimization helps you ensure people view your site correctly on phones and tablets. Web elements like pop-ups, image-heavy pages, and tiny text can make your site difficult to navigate on mobile.

Of course, generalizations aren’t always helpful, so check your analytics data to find out what percentage of your users and customers browse on mobile devices and understand how important mobile optimization is to your business.

If you're using Contentsquare, for example, your dashboard gives you a breakdown of your site users’ devices.

Popular mobile optimization tools

• Mobile-Friendly Test

• WebPageTest

📖 Case study: how mobile optimization boosted De Beers’ revenue 

World-leading diamond company, De Beers, used Contentsquare to view heatmaps of their mobile site. They filtered the heatmap of a product page to show only users who converted, and realized that most people scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page—even though the ‘Add to Bag’ CTA was at the top of the page. 

The De Beers team hypothesized that users couldn’t see the ‘Add to Bag’ button, and created a sticky CTA instead. This small change increased mobile conversions by +10%.

6. Accessibility tools

An accessible website is easy for everyone to use—which is a win-win for you and your visitors: great UX for them and more happy customers for you.

Accessibility tools show you how your landing pages appear on a screen reader or to people with various impairments (for example, different types of color blindness). These tools also provide optimization suggestions to make your website more inclusive.

Popular accessibility optimization tools

• Check My Colours

• EqualWeb

• Functional Accessibility Evaluator

Bonus type 7: a classic optimization tactic not to neglect 

So far, we’ve listed 30+ web optimization tools you can use right now to grow your website’s traffic and revenue. And there are thousands more where those came from. 

Whichever one you start with, don’t forget the one optimization tactic that’s so obvious that it’s chronically undervalued: speaking to your customers. 

Even if you have the fastest website on the planet and rank high for your target keywords, no amount of speed or SEO ‘best practices’ is a substitute for asking users directly how they feel from time to time—otherwise known as collecting voice-of-customer (VoC) insights. 

Try things like: 

• Launching surveys to pop up on key pages, or at important moments in the customer journey 

• Running 1-on-1 interviews to discuss pain points and moments of delight users experience on your site 

• Conducting user tests to understand how users complete simple tasks on your site, and hear about any unexpected complications they experience  

Once you’ve asked users what they expect from your website, and how they find the experience of navigating it, you can develop an optimization strategy that delivers exactly what they need.

FAQs about website optimization tools