Tools
The best tools for building a website
An honest list of the tools worth your time in each category — hosting, analytics, speed, SEO, structured data and AI visibility — with what each one is actually good at.
9 min read·Updated
Short list, no affiliate links, no sponsored entries. One of the tools below is ours and is labelled as such — you can weigh that however you like.
AI visibility
The newest category, and the one with the fewest tools in it. The question is whether assistants can reach your store, read what you sell, and quote you correctly.
Checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini can open your store, whether your product data is complete, and whether the price in that data matches the page. Returns the corrected robots.txt and product markup rather than just a complaint. No account, nothing stored.
Tells you which structured data Google can read on a page and how it might display it. Google-specific, and it only reports what Google supports — but it catches malformed markup fast.
Validates against the schema.org vocabulary itself rather than one search engine’s subset. Use it when you want to know if your markup is correct, not just whether Google likes it.
Seeing what search engines see
Free, official, and the first thing to set up on any site that wants to be found.
What Google has indexed, what it could not, and which queries bring people to you. The Page Indexing report is the fastest way to find pages silently excluded.
Worth ten minutes to set up even if Bing is a small share of your traffic, because several AI assistants have drawn on Bing’s index.
Crawls your whole site like a search engine and lists every broken link, redirect chain, missing title and duplicate canonical. Free up to 500 URLs, which covers most small stores.
Speed
Measure on a mid-range phone on a slow connection, not on your laptop on office wifi.
Combines a lab test with real-world data from actual Chrome users where enough exists. The field data is the number that matters; the lab score is a diagnostic.
Far more control — real devices, specific locations, throttled connections, and a filmstrip showing exactly what a visitor sees at each moment. The best tool for working out why a page feels slow.
Compress and convert images in the browser, with a side-by-side quality comparison. Images are usually the largest thing on a product page and the easiest win.
Accessibility
Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real problems. They are still worth running, because that third is the cheap third.
A browser extension that flags issues with almost no false positives, which is rare in this category. Start here.
Overlays problems directly on the rendered page, which makes it much easier to explain a finding to someone who is not a developer.
Analytics without the weight
Traditional analytics is often the slowest script on a store and the reason a cookie banner exists at all. These are lighter, and mostly avoid the banner entirely.
Open source, cookie-free, and a script small enough not to show up in your performance budget. Self-hostable if you would rather own it.
Much the same idea with a different interface and EU data hosting. Pick on preference.
Open source and free to self-host. The best option if you have somewhere to run it and want no ongoing cost.
Knowing when it breaks
Your store will go down. The only question is whether you find out before your customers tell you.
Checks your site every few minutes and messages you when it stops answering. The free tier is enough for a single store.
Uptime monitoring plus a status page and on-call scheduling, for when one person receiving an email is not enough.
Questions
- Do I need all of these?
- No. Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, an uptime monitor and an AI visibility check cover most of what a small store needs, and all four have free tiers.
- Why is your own tool on this list?
- Because it fills a category that otherwise has nothing in it, and leaving it off to seem neutral would be its own kind of dishonest. It is marked as ours wherever it appears.
- Are these affiliate links?
- No. There are no affiliate links, sponsorships or paid placements anywhere on this site. Every entry is here because we use it.
Once you have picked your tools, the launch checklist is what to point them at.