First comes first. In order to optimize or improve the performance of a website, you need to monitor or analyze the website in detail. There are a lot of tools that allow you to do that but we have picked a few that offer some unique features:

1. PageSpeed:

PageSpeed is a FireFox plugin that allows web masters to improve the performance of their website by providing various technical suggestions. It covers issues like CSS validations, Connection times, Cache, parsing functions, DNS look-ups, java scripts e.t.c.

2. LinkChecker:

LinkChecker allows you to scan all the links on your website and see if there are any broken links. You can also set the recursion depth to check links within documents.

3. ServerCheck:

ServerCheck provides some simple monitoring tools to see if your website is really down. You can also enter a domain name to get the IP address, or vice-versa.

4. AreMySitesUp:

AreMySitesUp sends you an email or SMS alert when your website goes down. You can track as many as 5 websites free of charge. Your website is checked 25 times a day and a notification is send if it is down.

5. WebWait:

WebWait tells you exactly how much time your website takes to load. You can use it to compare your website against competitors or industry benchmarks. It also takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and loading of the images while calculating the load time.

6. FiveSecondTest:

FiveSecondTest lets you create a usability test. Just create a screenshot of your website and let people tell you what they remember in 5 seconds.

7. 404 Error Creator:

For those unfortunate times when your website does go down, create a cool 404 error page. You can upload an image of your choice and customize your html.

8. WebsiteGrader:

WebsiteGrader provides detailed reports for your website including search engine ranking, link counts, domain info, website structure and summary of links submitted to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious.

9. Xinu:

Xinu is a very useful tool to check the popularity of your website. It tests your website against dozen of popularity metrics, checks for incoming link counts, validates your CSS and HTML, check your page rank and back links. It gives you a comprehensive overview from an SEO perspective.

10. ValidChecker:

ValidChecker validates your HTML, CSS and RSS code. However, a unique feature that they offer is to receive periodic updates about the validation of your website’s code. You can either receive daily updates or just whenever an error is found.

11. SEO-Browser:

SEO-Browser allows you to see your websites just like a search engine views it. Nothing to install or download, just eneter the URL and submit. The Advanced mode also provides you details about the metadata.

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