Category: Quick Web Utilities
Is your slow webpage/website speed due to your CMS?
It can be difficult to evaluate what is causing a slower website speed, especially when you use a CMS which does a lot of the work for you.
We often use tools like Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights to help us find what the actual website speed of the full site is, and both of those sites have suggestions for
use a tool like Pingdom to test your website speedspeeding things up.
A suggestion that often comes up in PageSpeed insight for a slow site will be:
They provide additional links and suggestions, but here is on suggestion I haven’t seen yet, to help evaluate how much of the speed is a related to CMS or server side processing.
- Load the page you are concerned about, perhaps http://matraex.com
- Right click and view the source of that page
- Save the text of that page (Ctrl A- Ctrl -C) open a notepad and Ctrl V, – Save as temp.test.html
- Upload the file to your website (ex: http://matraex.com/temp.test.html) .
- Test the site speed with Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights
Note the difference in speed, you can use a tool like the Matraex Webpage Performance Assessment Tool which will allow you to save some of the important numbers you get from each of the sites and then compare them the next time.
If you are on a ubuntu or other linux server and the current working directory is the root of your website, A quick one line way to create the file is
htdocs> wget -O temp.test.html http://matraex.com
Website Owners 6 Free Speed Security and SEO Tools
Website Owners 6 Free Speed Security and SEO Tools
6 Free Speed, Security and SEO Tools Matraex, Inc Uses
There are a plethora of tools out there to help you evaluate your website. We have built a few ourselves that help us manage multiple websites. The following list is geared towards a website owner and should help you to understand some important aspects of your website.
If you should ever need anything part of your website changed, contact us here at Matraex for fast effective help.
1) Pingdom Webspeed Test
A good, full page speed load tester, it gives a score and suggestions for improvements – http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
2) Google PageSpeed Insights
A phenomenal resource for understanding how you can improve the load speed and experience of your website. Google gives you a Mobile and Desktop Grade and then gives suggestions and advice with downloads. – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
[Matraex Website Performance Assessment Log – saves results from tools 1 and 2 above to help users ‘watch’ the effect that changes have on their performance]
3) Qualys SSL Labs test
A great free test to check that your SSL certificate on your site does not have any vulnerabilities, The site gives your SSL certificate a grade and describes any problems. This is a great repeatable test if you have a site looking to become PCI compliant – https://www.ssllabs.com/
4) Jitbit SSL
Scan your https:// site to see if you have any insecure content. This test can help identify images, style sheet, javascript and other linked content which runs over an insecure (http://) connection – https://www.jitbit.com/sslcheck/
5) Securi Site Scan
Run a scan on your WordPress website with securi, this will help identify malware or hacks on your site. – https://sitecheck.sucuri.net
6) SEMRush SEO Evaluation
Find how your site is performing – SEM Rush gives you a single overview page with almost too much information. Take a look at your results for organic search backlinks and keywords. The initial report is free however SEM Rush charges for more frequent and advanced reports. Their free report gives you a good general idea to allow you to decide whether you want to get more indepth – https://www.semrush.com/
We of course want to include a link to our free tool as well, our tool helps us to take an even smaller, faster look at a WordPress Website’s speed, security and exposure, take a look if it fits your type of site – https://www.matraex.com/website-check.php
If these tools gave you a good idea about how your website is performing for you, but you would like more info or you would like to improve it, contact us or give me a call to discuss your website – Michael Blood 208.344.1115 x 250
Custom network tools we use at Matraex
We had a need for some Network Tools and we could not find them, so we created them
As Matraex has been developing websites over the last 15+ years, we have used many tools to do it.
We often find areas which there are no tools, or we could automate time consuming or error prone tasks in order to get them done more quickly and efficiently.
For these areas, we have developed some Network Tools which help us to get what we need done.
DNS and Name Servers
Bulk DNS Lookup
One of areas we identified was when dealing with new customers with a large number of domains. In ideal situations, the domains would all be registered with a single registrar account and all using known name servers. However that has not always been the case. We built the Bulk MX, DNS Domain Lookup tool to help us quickly assess the domain name, where it is located, who hosts the Name Servers, domains and mail services.
Name Server Compare
In other cases we found that we needed help in identifying where multiple name servers is not set to the same value on different servers. For example if a domain uses three different name servers, there are times that those name servers many not be setup the same and may report different values.
For this we built the https://www.matraex.com/nameserver-compare-tool/
This is especially useful when moving a number of domains from one name server to another.
Website Performance
Website Performance Assessment Log
To help us track the performance increase (or decrease) for Websites we built the Website Performance Assessment Log. The tool has very little functionality itself, however it allows you to type in statistics from Pingdom and from Google’s PageSpeed Insights, then once you make changes to your site you can type in the next set of statistics. This is helps to track which changes made a difference and which changes did not.
WordPress Website Check
We needed to quickly be able to assess a new WordPress website. So we built the Website Check tool which grabs some quick speed and page load statistics, does some security checks and checks on what your WordPress site exposes.
Other less popular, but some times helpful tools,
- our CSS helper tool, this tool helps us identify duplicate and overriding style sheet definitions on a single style sheet.
- Our buik – unix time to date converter. You can paste in a block of text (typically I copy this from some syslog file which logged in unix timestamps) and the tool replaces any found timestamps to help us quickly read the results with Date/ Time stamps
Matraex Inc has other tools as well and we try to offer these tools free (within reason) in order to allow others to do the same thing we do.
Website Performance Assessment Tool Store Compare Page Speed Size Grade
Webpage performance is important and there are a plethora of tools out there that allow you to see your website’s performance.
The tools give a large amount of information and website owners can use that information to make assessments and improvements.
As we use these tools to help our clients improve the performance of their websites, we found a couple of needs:
- We needed a tool to quickly compare the results between changes
- We needed somewhere we could go to quickly lookup results next time that we evaluated the performance
So, we built the Website Performance Assessment Tool (matraex.com/website-performance).
This tool allows us to 1) Enter a web page url 2) Link to two third party performance tools(pingdom,PageSpeed) 3) Enter the results and 4) Save
The numeric results are then stored in a table and as we make changes we can see how performance improves.
With a couple of enhancements (the ability to track multiple urls and an improved User Interface) we decided to make this tool public and encourage others to use it.
The primary benefits we see are:
- The ability for non technical users to track their site performance
- Website owners can track and evaluate changes made by their website developer
- Website developers and website owners can use the tool to communicate performance expectations and results
Here is one example of how it can work:
- A website owner opens the website assessment performance tool and enters their website url
- They use the quick links to generate metrics for a Performance Grade, Number of Requests, Load time, Page size and a Desktop and Mobile Grade
- They enter the metrics into the tool and click Save
- They notice that the total Load time is more than 4 seconds so they ask their website developer to improve the results.
- Specifically they describe they want:
- the Load Time to decrease to less than 2 seconds and
- the Desktop and Mobile Grade should improve to better than 85% each
- The developer makes changes and tells the owner the changes are complete.
- The owner opens the Performance Tool and re enters the metrics and evaluates whether it is true.
- One month later the owner comes back to the tool and checks again and can see the history and whether performance has degraded.
Code Source Text and White Space Quick Count Evaluation Tool
Code Source Text and White Space Quick Count Evaluation Tool
I created a simple website utility which can be used to evaluate the white space in some code or returned from a website.
Paste in the code from your editor, or you can type in a URL and it will download the html and evaluate that
The results counts up all of your characters, shows you how much white space there is.
It also shows you how many blank lines you have, whether you are using tabs or spaces at the beginning of your lines (this is useful to me to help coordinate similar code indenting formats between developers)
This tool can be pretty useful when wanting to figure out things related to white space usage.
https://www.matraex.com/character-coding-evaluator.php
At the bottom of the reusults, every line is displayed with details of each line and how many spaces are at the beginning of the line
if you have suggestions, email me with ‘White Space Evaluation’ in the subject michael @ matraex.com.
Bulk Domain NS, MX and A record lookup tool
Summary: We have two tools to help you lookup information on domains quickly
- quick-domain-research.php – See the NS, MX, A records and IPs for multiple domains in one table
- nameserver-compare.php – Compare NS, MX, A records for multiple domains, against multiple Name Servers
Bulk Domain NS, MX and A record lookup tool
Occassionally, we come across some sort of project in which we have to work through a list of multiple domain names and make some sort of changes.
In some cases we simply have to update contact records, in other cases we have to determine ownership, hosting and mail setups so we can assist with an ownership transfer.
There are a plethora of domain tools out there which help one at a time, But we were hard pressed to find a tool that could do a bulk lookup of multiple domains with table based out put.
So, we built the tool
https://www.matraex.com/quick-domain-research.php
This tool has the
- A records for the root domain (@) and the (www) domain.
- MX records for the root domain
- NS records for the root domain
This tool was thrown together quickly to help us identify whether an OLD but active nameserver, which had dozens of domain names on it, was actually being used for the domains.
We were able to delete more than 20 domains cluttering up the DNS entries.
Additionally we were able to clean up associated webservers that had not been cleaned of hosting accounts after a client left the account.
Some future ideas which will make their way in next time:
- Display whois information for the domain
- Optionally group the domains based on which name servers, whois records or www C class they are hosted at
Update 11/28/2015 by Michael Blood
Since this original post, we have added several new features including the ability to upload a file with a large batch upload, and download a CSV file with the results. You can see all of the details in this Enhanced Bulk Domain NS, MX and A record lookup tool post.