How can I check my web page for errors?

Question:

How can I check my web page for errors?

Answer:

There are dozens of services available that are capable of checking your website for errors. Below is a listing of some of our favorite free online services.

General website / HTML checks

• Silktide Nibbler - Fantastic free online service that gives you a good complete overview of your website with an overall score.
• Total Validator - Great service that allows you to quickly check for various errors such as HTML errors, spelling errors, total load time, and the ability to create a screen shot of what the page looks like in other browsers.
• Feng-GUI - Great service that allows you to upload a picture of your home page or other pages and generate a heat map of where the visitor's eyes aremost likely to go first.
• W3C markup validation - The source to go to check HTML, XHTML or other markup language you use on your web page for errors.
• Google Webmaster Tools - A must for any Webmaster. With this free service you can quickly identify any page or links with errors, scan for malware, find pages with short or missing titles, find duplicate meta tags, and much more.
• IE NetRender - Great online service that allows you to easily see how your page is displayed in different versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. This is really helpful if you need to test your web page in an older browser such as IE6, which had a lot of compatibility and other issues with CSS.
• HTML Tidy - Simple and easy to use online tool that allows you to quickly identify any HTML errors you may have on your page.

CSS checking

• W3C CSS validation service - Fantastic service that will display any issues errors or compliance warnings you have with any CSS code.
• CSS Compressor - Although not a service to validate for errors this is a great tool to use after your CSS code has been verified. Using this tool you can shrink your CSS file to help the overall load time of every page that links to the .CSS file and decrease the overall amount of bandwidth you use.

Speed test

• WebPagetest - Our favorite tool for testing a web pages load time.
• Pingdom Tools - Fantastic service that gives you a good and easy to read overview of how long it takes for something to load on your web page. Keep in mind most web site visitors only spend a few seconds on each page they visit.
• WebSiteOptimization - Another great service to find how much time it takes to load your web page and what you can do to help decrease the overall time it takes to load it.
• Web Page Content Compression Verification - Great tool to quickly test an individual page or element on the page (such as a .CSS or .JS file) to see if it's being compressed before being sent using gzip.

Accessibility

• Colorblind filter - Fantastic page to see how your page would look to someone who has colorblindness. This is an easy way to make sure that someone with colorblindness whose visiting your site is not going to miss something because your color scheme is bad.
• HERA - Great page to quickly verify if everyone regardless of any disability can view your page they may have.
• html2txt - A great method of converting your HTML page into a text document. This is helpful because many accessibility tools for the blind will simply convert pages to text, using this tool you can get a good idea how someone who's blind may read your page.

Mobile-readiness

• mobiReady - By far the best site and service for checking how compatible your website or blog is when being viewed on a mobile device. This service not only gives you detailed information on why your website may or may not work but also gives live demos on how the page will load on different mobile devices.

Analyze

• Google Analytics - Fantastic free service offered by Google that gives you full details of the visitors visiting your website, what browsers they're using, where they're leaving, what they searched for, and much more. After making sure your website has no errors having this services is always a good idea to help identify any other problems the above services may have not identified.

Checking a Blog

If your page is a blog consider running it through Is My Blog Working? to check to see if the blog is working and get other technical details about it. This can give you additional details about your page as well as anything you may want to change or add to the page.

Test

Having friends, family, and co-workers viewing your website is a great way to make sure your website not only works but works on different types of computers. Other services like fivesecondtest is also another great free way of testing the overall appeal of your site.