Website Troubleshooting Tools
Website troubleshooting is damn near impossible without using some tools. It's like fixing a car without wrenches and screwdrivers. So, what tools do you need to figure out what's wrong with your site? Glad you asked! Here are a few you can use.
Google Analytics As a Website Troubleshooting Tool
If you're not using the free Google Analytics service, you're missing out on valuable data and information about how your site is doing in search results and satisfying user experiences. Google Analytics shows you how well (or not) your site and individual web pages are performing.
For example, looking at a year's worth of data below, there is a serious dip in traffic for this site. What happened? By regularly reviewing Google Analytics data, you can catch issues like this early and fix whatever was causing this huge traffic drop. For this particular issue, the server was down for a significant time. Ouch!!!!
Using Google Search Console For Website Troubleshooting
Another free tool is Google Search Console. Unlike Analytics, Search Console shows you if there issues with Google crawling, indexing and ranking your content. Two different things!
Take a look at these elements that Google crawlers evaluate for you at no cost!
Other Website Troubleshooting Tools
Between Analytics and Search Console, you can do a pretty decent job troubleshooting traffic/ranking drops and crawl/index issues that prevent your site from showing up higher in search results. But sometimes you want to go a little deeper, so here are few more SEO tools that help you figure out why your site isn't doing as well in search results.
- Screaming Frog Log Analyser - this is an advanced SEO software application you can use to view your web hosting server log files to see exactly which URLs Google is crawling, what date/day/time it can knocking on the door, and the exact pages that were crawled. This is very handy if your important product, service and blog post URLs aren't getting the Google love they need.
- Moz SEO tools - an all in one dashboard that has a monthly fee, this is a comprehensive service that monitors ranking, technical, content and link elements that all contribute towards better search engine visibility. It tells what you need to fix, and the recommended actions to take. Pricey, but good to use if you have the budget.
- Pingdom Website Speed Test Tool - this is a no-cost service that gives you and your developer valuable information about how fast or slow your site loads, and the reasons why it's slow. You'll get detailed information on the exact elements and files that are slowing your site down. Considering that Google uses page and domain load times, this is a handy tool to help you improve website performance and search visibility.
There are dozens of others out there, but for troubleshooting website issues that inevitably happen, try using these to help you figure out problems quickly and the corresponding fixes to get your website back on track.
If you'd like to know more about how to use SEO tools to troubleshoot website ranking issues, check out the advanced SEO training class Invenio SEO offers. You'll be glad you did!
As always, until we meet again, stay safely between the ditches!
All the very best to you,
Nancy McDonald
Screenshots courtesy of author, January 2019
