Nibbler: Awesome Website Testing

There’s a lot of ways to test and benchmark your website, but few are as fun as Nibbler. And it’s free!

What does Nibbler do?

Nibbler will go through 5 pages of which ever site you specify and test them on a range of relevant criteria. Once it’s finished you’ll get a nice, visual report – scoring on each criteria and giving you an overall score. The report includes tips and ideas on improving your score – which should also improve your overall web presence.

What criteria does it test?

Here’s a list of what they test on, in no particular order:

Grain of Salt

Nibbler is not meant to be the holy grail of website testing, so take the results you get only as a suggestion, or starting point. Some of the results you simply can’t fix. For example, when testing spigotdesign.com I get errors on things like Facebook Sharing, Incoming links, and Social media. I don’t spend enough time on Facebook to get anyone to like this site – so for me it’s nothing to worry about.

If you get errors with Semantic HTML, or URL format, then you’ve definitely got something to work on.

Beyond Nibbler

For those who desire more robust, professional website testing there’s SiteRay. It’s made by the same folks who make Nibbler and has the same easy to use testing tools but goes quite a bit farther. You can even give it a test drive for free.

If you enjoy tinkering with your website in the hopes of making it ‘better’ – Nibbler is a fun way to do it. At the very least it’ll be a great reminder to add metadata to each and every post.