14 Best Website Optimization Tools to Try in 2023 and Beyond

Having just any website no longer cuts it these days. It’s not just competitors you should be worried about - it’s every other website online. Visitors have higher expectations with each day and if you have a website from 1998 that takes 20 seconds to load - you can say goodbye to new visits and conversions.

While a lot of work is happening in the back end, with developers and designers doing their magic, you can also do plenty of things to optimize your website. Whether it’s speed, messaging, design, or something else, you can improve quite a lot using readily available tools.

Here are some of the best website optimization tools you can try today.

Survicate

Surveys are a superb way to collect customer feedback - even before the age of the internet. With Survicate, you can create a large number of surveys thanks to 80+ available survey templates you can grab - even in the free plan.

You can use some of the many survey types that your visitors could benefit from, including:

• Consumer preference survey template
• User persona survey template
• Content rating survey template
• Customer effort score survey template
• Newsletter feedback survey template
• ‘What stops you from signing up?’ survey template

If you want to quickly and accurately determine what your customers think about their website experience, surveys are the way to go. In the Survicate dashboard, you can get an immediate overview of your responses and make the necessary changes in time.

Survicate integrates with a large number of platforms that can help you amplify your questions even further. Connect it with your email marketing tool of choice (such as MailChimp) and you can send surveys through emails. You can also embed them in your HubSpot website and send them to your HubSpot CRM. Or get Slack notifications about survey results…

Essentially, Survicate lets you quickly collect customer feedback so you know what customers think about your website. Stop making guesses and basing decisions around your website on gut feel - Survicate can give you the quantitative feedback you need to really improve the website experience.

Start your journey to customer-centric decision-making with Survicate. Sign up for a free account and enjoy a 10-day trial with essential features. Don't miss our pricing page to find the right plan for your business.

Considering the massive number of ways you can use Survicate even outside of your website, it’s more than worth the investment. Ready to give it a go? Sign up for your free trial today!

Smartlook

Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall as your visitors are on your website? Well, now you can do just that with Smartlook. This tool allows you to do just that - monitor what visitors are doing in real-time.

Some great features in this tool include:

• Visitor session recordings (so you can review individual users)
• Heatmaps (to show general visitor behavior and spot UX and UI issues
• Funnel analysis (to see how customers move through your sales funnel)
• Events (specific pages your visitors are on with each session)
• Cross-platform performance (see how visitors move from mobile to PC and other devices)

The free trial will give you a full taste of Smartlook before committing. Paid plans start at $39 per month, which is not a lot compared to the level of insights that you’re getting for the money.

Fullstory

If you’ve taken a look at Smartlook, Fullstory is similar but different. It has all the basics you would expect, including visitor session recordings and heatmaps and they work in a similar way to Smartlook and Hotjar.

Where it stands out is the extra features such as frustration signals - an entire section of the app that tells you when something is causing your visitors to get upset and leave the website. Other great features include user segments (so you can split up your website visitors in different groups), dashboards for visualizing your funnels, and more.

The free trial lasts 14 days but you cannot get access to pricing without attending a demo first. On the basis of transparency only, Smartlook might be the better choice between the two.

Optimizely

While it used to be just a platform for split testing, Optimizely is now an entire platform for content planning and management. If you’re looking for a central location to manage all your website content, this might be a good choice - but let’s get back to optimization.

There are two different plans that can help you here - website experimentation and feature experimentation. These allow you to run split tests, create predictable audiences using AI and get all of your results and analyses in one place.

The problem is, you can’t get a free trial and there is no publicly available pricing. In other words - get in touch with them to get a quote.

Google Optimize

It’s hard to talk about website optimization without mentioning Google Optimize. If you’re already using Google Analytics (as you should be), Google Optimize is the next logical step.

It lets you create two different versions of a website page and have them run against each other in terms of a specific objective. For example, you can set up a call to action with two different versions of copy and see which one converts better.

The free version should be more than enough because it has all the basics covered. More so than that, the paid version is called Optimize 360 and it is rumored to cost more than $150,000 per year. Ouch.

ClickCease

PPC is a very impactful way to get new customers. Unlike SEO and content marketing, you can pretty accurately forecast the results you’ll get and see where you can make quick wins. The problem is, your competitors can try to exploit this and this is where ClickCease comes to play.

This tool finds bots that click on your ads, eating up your ad budget. ClickCease analyzes all the traffic coming to your website and from your Facebook page, blocking out bots that intentionally click on your ads to waste your ad budget.

You can grab a free trial and paid plans start at $69. It may sound like a lot on top of all other costs, but if you run a lot of PPC campaigns, you can save much more than that every month.

Ahrefs

When it comes to organic traffic performance, there’s only so much that you can do with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool and for a good reason. It has a vast array of different options to make sure your website performs better in search engine results.

Ahrefs can show you the current organic performance of not just your website, but also your competitors. This means keywords, backlinks, the most popular pages, paid search results, newly ranking pages and more. You can always be in the loop and find out what you need to improve to stay ahead of the competition.

There is no free plan, unfortunately. However, trust us on this one - Ahrefs is worth the cheapest subscription plan at $99 per month. The value that you can get out of it for your website and visitors is immense.

Surfer SEO + Grow Flow

There’s a good chance you’ve heard of SurferSEO, which is a tool meant for writers and SEO experts. You simply load up a keyword and this tool will give you instructions on which keywords to include to give you a better chance of ranking well in search engine results.

Grow Flow is a tool within SurferSEO that is built specifically for website optimization. Connect Grow Flow with your Google Analytics and it will send you daily, bite-sized tasks that you can perform to optimize your website.

This can include internal link suggestions, content audits to improve your articles, suggestions for new article ideas based on your existing content and so much more. If you’re just getting into the world of SEO and content, this can be an amazing way to get new optimization ideas daily.

You can use the free trial but the fun starts with the paid plans at $49 per month and up. Besides Grow Flow, you also get access to up to 10 articles you can do in Surfer’s Content Editor. This is great value for money for any website.

GT Metrix

Having a fast website in 2022 is no longer something that’s nice to have - it’s a necessity. If a website takes more than a few seconds to load, your visitors will leave. This not only causes high bounce rates but also hurts your SEO performance. So, the first step is to find out just how fast your website loading speed it, with GTMetrix.

This is the most famous tool online for just this job. Load up your website URL and it will show you a range of important metrics:

• Web vitals
• Lighthouse metrics
• Analysis options and more

You can track your performance over time and even get notifications when your website is loading too slowly. Essentially, every tool you need to keep track of your website speed.

It’s possible to test your website for free but if you want to constantly monitor your website speed, the cheapest paid plan is $128 per year. This gives you three slots for monitoring and up to 175 weekly tests - more than enough to keep things in check.

WAVE

Wave is a web accessibility tool that lets you immediately find the things you can fix to make your website more accessible. Besides making for a better user experience, web accessibility is also a ranking factor, so you want to make sure your website is easy to view and use for people with disabilities.

Just copy and paste your website link and this handy tool will give you suggestions on what you can fix immediately, including screen contrast issues, image alt descriptions, structural and design errors, and more.

The best of all is that the tool is free to use.

Userpilot

If you run a web product, Userpilot should be on your list of products to watch. Getting people to your website and in your product is one piece of the puzzle and getting them to use your product and the right features is something entirely different.

Basically, Userpilot sends targeted messages to your visitors, nudging them to use a certain feature, move along with the onboarding or do just the right thing to keep them returning and stop them from churning.

You can get started for free and the paid plans start at $249 per month. It might seem like it’s pricey but the customers you save should more than make up for the cost.

UserTesting

Sometimes, you’re not sure whether your visitors understand what to do on your website - or if an aspect of your website is even useful or not. For this, you can use UserTesting.

The app does exactly what it says. You can choose a certain aspect of your website to test, such as a landing page or form, select your audience (from your own visitors or the expert UserTesting panel) and let them test it. You can then get their insights and even watch session replays to find out how they’re solving that specific problem.

There is no publicly available pricing but bear in mind that if you’re testing with UserTesting’s audience, you’re going to have to pay for each entry.

Better Stack

Running a website is not always a pleasant experience and it can sometimes crash and cause downtime. This is where BetterStack comes in, saving you from an inconvenience and saving your customers from losing their data, time and money.

There are two aspects of the product - Logtail (for keeping user logs) and Better Uptime (for monitoring uptime), both working for your website while you work on more important things. The tool monitors errors on your website and if downtime happens, they call you so you can solve the issue immediately. 

For $24 per month, you can get peace of mind knowing someone always has your back.

Zapier

Technically speaking, Zapier is not a website optimization tool. However, it just as well could be one. This fascinating software works with more than 5,000 different apps and you can use it to connect different tools and create workflows that suit your specific use case.

The list of tools is endless and you can visit their website to get inspired about what you could potentially connect.

The free trial gives you up to 100 Zaps or actions per month. You’ll quickly run out of this though, and the paid plans start at $19.99 monthly. If your tools don’t have native integrations, this is a great way to keep things connected.

Wrapping up

When you run a website for your business, the work never stops. There is always one more thing to optimize and improve and it seems like a never-ending process. However, it all comes down to asking your visitors what they prefer and need and you can then focus only on the things that matter.

Wondering how to do just that? Just sign up for Survicate, add some surveys on your website and you’ll immediately see how your customers feel about your website. What are you waiting for? Sign up for your free trial today! Also, you can foster your decision making by checking our newst ranking of best customer satisfaction tools or best website satisfaction tools.

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