18 Free Website Usability Testing Tools for Optimizing User Experience

The Usability Testing tools every marketer/website owner should know, that will make your website more awesome. Here is the list of 18 best free usability testing tools.

1. Google Page Speed Tool

One of the best tools to analyze and optimize the speed of your website. Page Speed Insights measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices.

2. Pingdom

A URL analysis tool which gives performance insights in the best possible way and finds blocks that you can eliminate to speed up your site.

3. Peek by Usertesting

Peek gives you a five-minute video of a real person using your site. All that’s required is your website URL, name, number, and email address, and you’re on your way to receiving a video in your mailbox.

4. IntuitionHQ

Using IntuitionHQ gives you objective information about how people will use the pages you’re designing. The free plan allows you to conduct 10 live tests with unlimited questions and up to 350 participants. To create a usability test you upload screenshots, then write tasks for users to complete. There are all sorts of ways to word your questions to get the information you need.

5. Usability Hub

Usability Hub offers 5 tools to test your websites with 20 free tests. You can also earn free tests by helping test other sites. Five Second Test – The best and most popular tool by Usability Hub designed to capture a visitor’s first impression of a site, each test takes five seconds to run. Click Test – Heatmaps is generated to show where testers clicked, and let you highlight clusters to easily tally up clicks. Question Test – A word cloud is generated help you quickly identify commonly occurring keywords in answers gives against design. Navigation Test – Shows you how many users completed the flow, where they clicked, where they dropped out, and how long they took. Preference Test – A great way of choosing between variations of logos, color schemes, layouts, copy, icons and interfaces.

6. BrowserShots

A free open-source usability test application that shows you how your site looks in different operating systems and browsers.

7. GTMetrix

GTmetrix gives you insight on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it. Get page load time, total page size & total # of requests and see your page’s performance relative to the average of all sites analyzed on GTmetrix. Along with that keep track of page performance with scheduled monitoring and visualize it with interactive graphs.

8. W3C Markup Validation Service

A free tool by W3C to check standards compatibility of HTML and XHTML markup. Type in the URL and you get a report showing errors in markup.

9. CheckMyColors

A tool for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits. All the tests are based on the algorithms suggested by the W3C.

10. OptimalWorkshop

A suite of usability testing tools for different aspects of usability. Treejack – to see which section of your website is most engaging, Optimal Sort – to see how people organize your content with card sorting are Chalkmark – to check first impression review of your design.

11. Usabilla

Usabilla helps you eliminate the guesswork and get the answers you need by collecting surveys, visual feedback, and insights. Know what is working and what isn’t and improve user experience.

12. Mobitest by Akamai

A free tool to measure the mobile web performance. Simply put your URL, choose from gives options, and hit run. Your page will be loaded on a real mobile device, and you’ll receive rich detail about page load time, including waterfall charts and video recording of the page load.

13. WebPageTest

An open source website performance and optimization tool developed by Google & AOL. A comprehensive visual comparison is also possible with this tool. Test results will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.

14. Website Grader by Hubspot

A free SEO usability tool that can help researchers identify issues in a web site that might need to be addressed. Website Grader analyzes 22 key indicators of SEO success, including on-page and off-page factors.

15. Optimizely – 30 Days Trial

Optimizely is not free but worth trying with the 30-day free trial. The best known A/B testing rich with a pretty decent set of features that will do nicely for most A/B tests. Tool allows you can configure A/B tests, multivariate tests, multi-page tests, and more. You can test as many variations and goals as you want.

16. SpurApp

A fun and easy way to critique a webpage. Spur has seven tools which will give you a new perspective to see things you might have missed.

17. Clickheat

An open source tool which is free and gives a visual heatmap of clicks on a webpage. In order to make it working you will have to install ClickHeat on your own server. Which is quite easy.

18. Screenfly by Quirktools

Tool with an easy-to-use interface that allows to test website on any screen size including desktops, tablets, televisions, and mobile phones.

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