Maintenance tools for webmasters

Regular website maintenance is essential to keep your website credible. Use the tools on this page to give your site a tune-up

The Web Credibility Project discovered that site maintenance and good design are essential for a visitor's faith in a website's content*.

"If websites were cars, it would be the trusty Toyota and not the flashy Ferrari that would win the web credibility race," says BJ Fogg who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab of which the Web Credibility Project is a part. "Sites lose credibility when they are not updated, when links are broken, or when the site is down unexpectedly," he says. "Our study didn't ask why this is so, but it seems reasonable that having outdated content or broken links reflects a lack of expertise or concern by the website operator. This negative impression likely generalises to the entire site, including the credibility of the content."

Use the tools on this page to maintain your site.

All round checkers

• Watson - free page checkers including HTML validation, spelling, link popularity, estimated download speeds and link checking.

Link checkers

• Broken link checker
• Linkalarm - checks the links on websites for a cent per page (not per link). Very user-friendly format.
• Free W3C Linkchecker - claims to search up to 150 linked documents on a site and is particularly useful for single page validations. It can take a long time for the check to finish, and the results rolling down the page aren't very easy to process.
• Linkchecker Lite - desktop freeware to check up to 1000 links. The presentation is good, but the downside of using desktop software is that each link test goes through your web connection, making it impractical to test large sites on anything but a broadband connection.

Speed optimisation

• Web page speed analyzer - Includes tools for compressing image files
• Web Page Analyzer
• (article on optimising your website for speed)

Code validation

• W3C HTML validator
• W3C CSS validator