Last Updated on April 16, 2023 by Alex Birkett
Want to optimize your website?
This post will give you 26 of my favorite website optimization tools.
What Are Website Optimization Tools?
Website optimization tools help you optimize the performance of your website.
How does this differ from conversion rate optimization tools or a/b testing tools? Well, in my opinion, website optimization tools are more holistic. Namely, they also include things like SEO, page speed, and usability.
All of this, of course, is aimed at increasing the value you’re getting out of your website.
Most of the lists I’ve seen on this topic have been incomplete due to the bias of the source. A “website optimizer” is, according to whoever is writing the list, either an SEO or a conversion optimizer. I think you need both.
Why am I credible?
Without giving a full biography, I’m well suited to write this list because I both work in conversion rate optimization as well as run a content marketing agency. Therefore, I’m using dozens of website optimizer tools regularly. And because I work with a variety of clients, I’ve worked with a variety of tools. So I’ve got experience and opinions.
The 26 Best Website Optimization Tools
- Frase
- Ahrefs
- SEMRush
- Clearscope
- Yoast
- HotJar
- Qualaroo
- Fullstory
- Wynter
- User Testing
- TryMyUI
- Google Optimize
- Convert
- AB Tasty
- Intellimize
- Mutiny
- CustomFit
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- PageSpeed Insights
- Screaming Frog
- Mobile-Friendly Test
- GTMetrix
- WAVE
- Intercom
- HubSpot
1. Frase
Frase is a cool optimization tool because it hits both of our criteria.
It helps you rank your blog posts and website pages higher, but it also helps you organize your website more effectively as well as drive higher conversions.
They do this through two different sets of tools: Frase Content and Frase Answers.
Frase Content helps you optimize your on-page content and copy so it has a better chance of ranking.
Like Clearscope (also featured on my list of best website optimizer tools), it allows you to write an article and, in real time, update it with suggested keywords. This is done by reverse engineering what Google implicitly is looking for in terms of ranking signals.
It also helps you choose the best internal linking structure as well as how to cluster your content. You can look at this as an integral tool in your content strategy planning arsenal.
Then Frase Answers helps you convert more readers to become customers, or just bring them further down the funnel (which is typically quite difficult to do, especially with top of the funnel content).
Basically, it uses bots and artificial intelligence to help you ncrease revenue per visitor by delivering instant answers to questions on search, chat, and beyond.
Frase is a newer tool, but I’ve quite enjoyed using it.
Whether you’re a content marketer, growth marketer, or anyone who is tasked with driving more visitors to sales, it’s going to be an effective tool to try out.
G2 Score: 4.8
Price: $44.99/month
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is my go-to SEO platform. If I had to pick one tool on the search engine optimization side, this would be it.
I use it everyday (sometimes compulsively, I’ll admit). Not only is it powerful, but it’s genuinely fun to use.
For one, I use it to construct my content marketing strategy, both for my personal website and agency website as well as for all my agency clients.
We begin by doing content and website audits of current content and then doing competitive research (analyzing organic competitors’ links, content, and keyword) to get a content gap report. This helps us determine and prioritize which keywords and topics we should add to our roadmap.
Then on the optimization side, I can use it to find out which keywords certain posts are ranking for, which helps inform the offers that I include on the page.
Finally, it’s great for analytics and tracking, which a rich feature set including rank tracking, backlink reporting, and traffic value analysis.
You can also audit SERPs over time (both Bing and Google) to track trends in feature snippets and the different pages ranking on results pages.
I don’t think running a content agency would be as fun or easy without Ahrefs.
G2 Score: 4.6
Price: $99/month
3. SEMRush
SEMRush has a very similar value proposition to Ahrefs as well as a similar set of optimization tools, though with some slight differences.
To be clear, I love both products. I typically use Ahrefs, but that’s because I’m more on the content marketing side of things. SEMRush is great for SEO and content, but it also contains tons of features that cater towards paid acquisition (PPC) and demand generation marketers.
Additionally, they have great local SEO tools as well as, in my opinion, a superior API (which you can use to build your own custom data tools).
They also have a great Google Docs Add On that helps you optimize on-page content (much like Yoast, Clearscope, and Frase).
There are tons of SEO tools out there, of course (Moz, Majestic, Conductor). But I prefer either Ahrefs or SEMRush. Other great products to complement your main SEO tool are Keywords Everywhere (Chrome extension) and AnswerThePublic.com (keyword research tool to find hidden organic search opportunities).
Lovely set of tools, great product and company.
G2 Score: 4.5
Price: $119.95/month
4. Clearscope
Clearscope is another relatively new tool to the content optimization software landscape, but it has quickly taken over, and in my view, it’s nearly ubiquitous among the smarters content marketers and SEOs I know.
What’s it do? Helps you rank. In more detail, it reverse engineers the on-page ranking signals for a given keyword, and then gives you a report with suggestions as to how you can better craft your content to rank.
This helps you punch above your weight class when it comes to content, often beating out websites with much higher authority and longevity.
As you can see, I’m actively using Clearscope to better position this article to rank:
This tool is now a crucial part of my writing process, both for my own website and for clients. While we don’t lead with SEO as the sole reason to write about a topic, if we’re hoping to rank for a keyword, we always put it through Clearscope. It’s low hanging fruit and super effective.
Also, it’s fun to use, especially for freelance writers without as much intuitive sense of SEO writing. It becomes a game to hit that A++ score (which updates actively as you write, so you can see your progress towards optimization perfection).
Great team and great vision. Love Clearscope.
G2 Score: 4.9
Price: $170/mo
5. Yoast
Yoast is the OG content optimization and on-page SEO tool. Of course, it has various features that expand beyond the on-page optimization stuff, like page redirects, URL slugs, and meta description optimization.
But at its core, it’s a wonderful (and cost effective) way for content marketers to make sure they’re well suited to rank for a given keyword.
It’s a WordPress plugin primarily, so it’s embedded in the WordPress editor, making it a frictionless proces to use.
Even if I’ve got access to Clearscope, Frase, or other tools, I still install Yoast and always use the on-page optimization functionality (in addition to the other great features). It’s a great gut check.
G2 Score: 4.6
Price: starts free
6. HotJar
Alright, now we’re making a clean break from the SEO related optimization tools and diving into the general user experience research and customer research category.
This class of tools will help you understand more about your visitors, both qualitatively and quantitatively. These tools can help you make content and SEO decisions, but they’re often more general, so you can apply the research to the problem at hand (which in my situation is typically a conversion rate optimization problem).
HotJar is the all-in-one qualitative research product. It includes features like:
- Session replays
- On-site polls
- Surveys
- Heat maps (click maps, scroll maps, mouse tracking)
- Form analytics
If you only have room in your budget for one conversion research tool, I’d made it this one for three reasons:
- Price (very affordable and scales well)
- Breadth (you get access to all kinds of different tools that you typically have to pay separately for)
- Ease of Use (it’s fun and easy to set up, even for research noobs)
In fact, HotJar is another one of these tools that has essentially become ubiquitous in certain niches (like CRO and user experience).
G2 Score: 4.3
Price: $99/month
7. Qualaroo
Qualaroo doesn’t have the same breadth of tools that HotJar has, but in my opinion, it is the absolute best option when it comes to on-site poll and survey tools.
You’ve definitely seen a Qualaroo poll in the wild. It looks like this:
It’s an amazing product for sourcing feedback from anonymous website visitors. Of course, sourcing feedback from this segment is sometimes super valuable and sometimes not at all (depends on the research problem at hand).
I personally love it for finding issues of clarity, motivation, doubt, and hesitation when it comes to the information or the copy on a given landing page or blog post. It’s also great for sourcing new content ideas if you put it on blog posts.
You can also find great insights about your core value proposition and differentiation if you put it on the Thank You page directly after someone purchases.
All in, it’s a very useful tool and research method to have in your toolbelt.
G2 Score: 4.3
Price: $80/month
8. Fullstory
Fullstory is similarly positioned in the user analytics and qualitative research tool space, but I’d say they differ slightly from the last two mentioned on the list.
In my opinion, they’re much better at tracking individual user journeys and mapping out the real customer journey and following users through various web pages.
They also have session replays as a core feature, and they amp it up with automatic flagging of frustrated sessions (using signals like rage clicks to tell when a user may be experiencing a usability issue).
But they also allow you to set up custom funnels and track key metrics, much like you would in Google Analytics (but more flexibly in Fullstory).
Want to see if visitors are actually seeing a call to action and clicking on it? Fullstory is great for this. Want to identify frustrating customer experience issues and user behavior patterns, fix them and in turn increase conversions? Again, great tool for this.
If you want greater clarity on your website, not just at a page level, but at a user level, then Fullstory is a wonderful product.
G2 Score: 4.5
Price: freemium (and then have to get a demo)
9. Wynter
Wynter is one of my favorite optimization tools. It’s a newer one created by the same team that runs CXL Institute and Speero.
If you’re familiar with user testing and usability testing, Wynter is like that, but for messaging and copywriting. This is important because copywriting has typically been one of the hardest things to quantify, especially in absence of sample sizes capable of running A/B tests.
The way it works is simple: you pick a page to test, determine your panel size and target (and they’re great at recruiting specific B2B panelists especially), and then they do all the rest of the work.
If you’d like, you can also use your own panelists, and you can also customize the questions they ask them. But I like to use their panelists and questions, since the hardest part generally is getting your target audience set up and designing the survey questions.
We’ve done this for our agency website and I’ve done it in optimizing other websites. It’s amazing what kind of insights you can get from this, most of which are super actionable or at least cue up experimentation ideas.
G2 Score: 4.9
Price: 1 test credit is $1 (price per test varies based on audience targeting, number of panelists, etc.)
10. UserTesting
UserTesting.com is the big name in user testing and usability testing.
You may think you’re the user, but until you watch actual users interact on your website, you won’t truly understand the usability issues that are present. In fact, just 5-7 testers can identify like 95% of user experience problems that are present on your site.
So what does the platform actually do? Similar to Wynter, they have a sort of marketplace to recruit panelists (though I think Wynter’s is actually more impressive in their targeting), so you can get your actual target audience to walk through the site.
Then you assign tasks and get to watch them walk through them trying to complete them. They also talk as they go through it, so you can not only observe their behavior, but also listen to what they vocalize (though I’ll say that the behavior is much more important and illustrative than their exposition).
When it comes to conversion research, I’ve found user testing and message testing to be the highest leverage activities. I’ve uncovered more low hanging fruit as well as great experiment ideas from these methods than all other methods of research.
G2 Score: 4.6
Price: request demo
11. TryMyUI
TryMyUI is another one of my favorite user testing and session replay tools for qualitative analysis and usability testing.
Not only do they have the ability to recruit panelists and run user tests, but they’ve also got tools to automatically flag signals of distressed users, like rage clicks, hitting the back button, and wild mouse movements.
They’ve also got tools for impression testing, mobile testing, and written surveys. It’s quite a holistic set of qualitative research tools.
Additionally, you get your first 5 users for free when you sign up. So you can try it with little downside.
G2 Score: 4.7
Price: $99 /mo
12. Google Optimize
Now we’re getting into the A/B testing tools, a critical category for website optimization.
Running A/B tests is the gold standard when it comes to establishing causality and reducing risk in decision making. Instead of just taking people’s qualitative feedback and directly implementing it, you can run controlled experiments and quantifiably justify rolling out a new experience or not.
Google Optimize is one of the most popular tools when it comes to A/B testing, multivariate testing, and personalization. Why? Because it’s part of Google’s digital marketing product suite, so they get their inherited audience and distribution reach. But also because it’s free to start and you can actually get a lot of range just from the free version.
While there are undeniably many limitations, such as the number of tests you can run, the embedded statistics engine, and limitations around custom javascript, it’s a great solution if you’re beginning to invest in experimentation
Note: Google Optimize sunsets Sept 2023. Here’s a list of Google Optimize alternatives.
G2 Score: 4.2
Price: Starts free and then enterprise is super expensive
13. Convert
Convert is probably my all around favorite experimentation tool at this point.
They’ve got all the critical functionality, including A/B tests (A/B/n, split page tests, multi-page tests, etc.), multivariate tests, and personalization and segmentation capabilities.
You can run your experiments client-side or server-side. They adhere to all regulations like GDPR. You can integrate directly and easily with analytics tools like Google Analytics or HotJar.
And I really like the team and the educational resources they put out. All around a great company, and the product itself isn’t crazy expensive.
I’ve used Convert at a few different websites, and if you’re in the consideration stage for a mature testing tool, this is a solid one to look into.
G2 Score: 4.7
Price: Starts at $699/mo (15 day free trial)
14. AB Tasty
AB Tasty is quickly rising in the ranks as a preferred experimentation platform.
Again, they do very well in producing reliable and powerful experiments. Of course you get a WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop editor, but you can also write custom javascript, jquery, CSS, HTML, etc.
They do A/B testing, multivariate testing, personalization (which includes AI-based segmentation), and all the standard stuff. They also cater towards product experimentation with feature flagging and server-side experiments.
While an issue of lesser importance, they enable bayesian based experiment analysis.
G2 Score: 4.5
Price: Not available online (have to talk to sales)
15. Intellimize
Intellimize is a personalization product. We’re now moving beyond A/B testing to providing all users with a unique website experience.
Their founder, Guy Yalif, is incredibly smart and is a great follow if you want to learn more about machine learning and artificial intelligence for marketers.
The product itself is great. They do algorithmic optimization through bandit testing and evolutionary algorithms (essentially, you can roll out many variants and their machine learning operates on a “survival of the fittest” method, meaning you’ll starve weak variants and dynamically drive more traffic to strong variants).
Additionally, the tool can automatically help you identify lucrative visitor segments to identify and target unique experiences.
I’m also impressed with their reporting infrastructure. You can easily see and manage your various personalization rules, which is super important at scale.
They do great ABM campaigns as well, as you can integrate with other data enrichment tools like Clearbit and Zoominfo.
Their greatest case studies and use cases seem to cater towards B2B, but I could definitely see this being a powerful tool for ecommerce optimization as well.
Great product and team.
G2 Score: 4.9
Price: Talk to sales
16. Mutiny
Mutiny is another great personalization product, a much newer one on the scene.
They specialize in B2B personalization.
Mutiny has pre-built data integrations to identify visitors by their industry, company size, funnel stage, advertising campaign and more. This allows you to identify which segments have the highest potential for personalization.
The thing about personalization is you’re still running on the same logic as A/B tests, just with smaller segments and samples. You still want to make sure the variant you’re targeting is optimal, yet it’s sent to a smaller audience, so it’s harder to tease this out, especially with very small segments.
So identification of lucrative segments is a huge issue and they do this well.
They also integrate with tools like SalesForce, Marketo, Segment, HubSpot, etc. so you can loop in all of your various customer data to both identify and produce unique experiences.
Love the team and the product, and it’s only improving over time.
G2 Score: N/A
Price: Not available (talk to sales)
17. CustomFit
One more personalization tool, this one being one that I recently discovered (and did a webinar with the team!)
What I like most about CustomFit is its ease of use. It’s made for marketers. So you can easily identify visitor segments to target, but you can also create no-code or low-code experiences by tweaking copy and design on given pages.
Of course, you can also write your own code for more complex personalization rules, but the ease of use is great for agile teams without many development resources.
They also have great account-based marketing functionality, integrating with data enrichment tools like Clearbit, Zoominfo, Segment, FiveTran, HubSpot, etc.
They also primarily focus on B2B personalization.
G2 Score: N/A
Price: Not available (talk to sales)
18. Google Analytics
If you’re going to optimize shit, you’re going to need to know your baseline data. You’re also going to need to analyze *where* to optimize.
This is where digital analytics or web analytics come in. And when it comes to digital analytics, there’s no tool more popular than Google Analytics.
I’ve written about Google Analytics a ton before. It’s what I’ve used with almost every company and client I’ve worked with. There’s a reason, too: unlike other free tools, this one is actually super powerful.
You get lots of insights out of the box, but it truly becomes powerful once you map out custom events, custom dimensions, and goals, so you can analyze micro-conversions and engagement on your website and correlate that with conversion events.
This article isn’t the place to fully explore GA’s power, but suffice to say, you can really learn a lot about your visitors and website performance with this tool (even analyzing technical issues like page speed and device breakdowns).
If you haven’t used GA much, I recommend CXL Institute’s courses on the topic.
G2 Score: 4.5
Price: Free!
19. Google Search Console
Every SEO in the world is going to have used Google Search Console at one point or another.
It’s a free set of tools that allows you to diagnose technical SEO issues and mobile usability issues, as well as do rank tracking analysis and see your total search impressions and click through rates for given keywords.
Here you can submit sitemaps and individual URLs for crawling. It also allows you to review your index coverage to make sure that Google has the freshest view of your site.
Finally, you get alerts for various issues that come up on your website that affect search performance, so you can fix them as they come up.
Great tool and free.
G2 Score: 4.5
Price: free
20. PageSpeed Insights
Another great free optimization tool from Google.
PageSpeed Insights, with no surprise, gives you insights about your page speed and website speed.
Page speed isn’t only a ranking factor, but it contributes to the user experience of your website, and thus, the performance and conversion rate of your website. Website slowdown experiments show that every millisecond has value.
Here’s what they found at Microsoft:
“An engineer that improves server performance by 10msec (that’s 1/30 of the speed that our eyes blink) more than pays for his (or her) fully-loaded annual costs. Every millisecond counts.”
Pretty wild, right?
Anyway, Google PageSpeed Insights is a great tool, and it’s free.
G2 Score: N/A
Price: free
21. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is for the technical SEOs.
It’s a spider crawler, so you can analyze your entire website and do an SEO audit. It helps you map out your internal linking structure, find missing title tags, meta descriptions, etc., and helps you identify missing pages, 404s, and broken links.
Even though many SEO platforms have website audit functionality, I still recommend using Screaming Frog. It’s comprehensive and the raw data you can access is useful for many purposes (internal link sculpting, broken link building, etc.).
G2 Score: 4.7
Price: Free (and the paid version is 149 pounds per year)
22. Mobile-Friendly Test
Google is well-invested and incentivized to help websites perform better from a technical perspective. This lets them surface pages with faster load time as well as mobile-friendliness (which represents a huge portion of traffic nowadays).
Mobile optimization is tough. This tool (free) helps you score your mobile-friendliness, diagnose potential issues, fix them, and track them over time.
Used in conjunction with PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, and Screaming Frog, and you’ve got a pretty good (and free) technical SEO audit setup.
G2 Score: N/A
Price: free
23. GTMetrix
For more robust website performance, page load speed metrics, and site audits, GTMetrix has you covered.
The cool thing about GTMetrix is you get the reports, but you can also track your performance over time to ensure you’re continuously improving.
They produce reports from Google Lighthouse on performance and speed, and they also give you performance milestones like Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time and Cumulative Layout Shift
G2 Score: 4.5
Price: Starts free and the next tier is $10/month
24. WAVE
WAVE is a web accessibility tool.
You can find, diagnose, and fix accessibility and usability issues like missing alt text, small text size, and contrast errors that make your content inaccessible to screen readers.
Accessibility is a massive part of website optimization that often goes overlooked. It’s not only morally right to optimize your website for accessibility, but if you don’t, you’re going to be missing a significant chunk of your audience, and thus performing worse than you could be.
G2 Score: N/A
Price: Free
25. Intercom
Intercom is a tool in a different class.
It’s really a messaging platform, but I find messaging to be a crucial part of website optimization nowadays.
Essentially, you want to meet visitors where their expectations are. Often, instead of searching through tons of pages, they want to get quick answers via live chat or chatbots.
Intercom enables this stuff, but they’ve also got a full email automation and messaging automation suite. You can use this stuff for acquisition, but you can also use it for engagement and product onboarding.
Really, the product is a platform and represents critical business functionality. Many use it across marketing, sales, and customer support.
And for some reason, I just like Intercom better than all the other chatbot alternatives. It just feels like the best performing and the best user experience of any of the options.
G2 Score: 4.4
Price: Starts at $59/month
26. HubSpot
Finally, HubSpot – the all-in-one platform that does seemingly everything.
They’ve got tools for marketing, sales, customer service, operations, developers, and on and on.
The tools that I want to bring your attention to here are the CMS and the free marketing tools.
For the CMS, you’ve got a great platform built with SEO in mind, and it’s something that both marketers and developers will find friendly, easy to use, and secure (with sufficient customizability).
For the free marketing tools, well, you can get pretty much everything done in terms of collecting leads and communicating with them. They’ve got:
- Form builders
- Popups
- Landing pages
- Live chat
- Chat bots
- Email marketing
- CRM
- Ads tools
All starting out for free! Plus, they give you free reporting and analytics with any of their products. There are many HubSpot competitors that do individual things better, but as an all-in-one suite, it’s an amazing resource.
G2 Score: 4.4
Price: Starts free, then starter tier is $50/month
Conclusion
Website optimization is an awesome endeavor, and there are now more tools than ever before to get the job done. Many of them are actually free, so you don’t need to break the bank to build a website that ranks in search engines, converts well, and has fast page speed and is optimized for mobile.
Obviously this list contains tools from all of these various aspects of optimization – conversion rate optimization, search engine optimization, and even technical and performance optimization.
It’s not usually the case that one team owns all of this, except maybe if you have a website strategy team.
Still, I hope this list was useful for you, no matter which specialty you’re working in