Building an ecommerce site is an easy thing, but maintaining its performance requires herculean efforts. You constantly need to test its performance so that you make necessary changes and keep on right track always.
There are dozens of tools available in the market which can help you test and improve the performance of your with ease. Interestingly, many of these tools are free and if not free, they very cheap.
Let’s have a look
1. Concept Feedback
This is one such tool that can give your right feedback on how design can improve the performance of your site. Concept Feedback helps its customer in 1st, increasing website performance with step-by-step advice; 2nd, a fresh outsider’s perspective with third party analysis; 3rd Effective designs that make your site more interactive; and 4th, quick results within 48 hours.
2. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is another astonishing tool that can tell you what customers view the most on your site. Based on a technology that can catch eye movements on any object, this tool can provide your fast results even if there is slow traffic on your site. This is tools is trusted by many prominent clients such as eBay, Forrst, Dell, Amazon.com, etc.
3. FiveSecondTest
We tend to recollect things quickly that are attractive and connect with our likings. Isn’t it? The FiveSecondTest is based on this very basic concept. This tool help you create an effective test that you send to your users. Your users then fill up the answers and you analyze if your message has been communicated effectively.
4. Feedback Army
It is another affordable tool to get quick reviews from third party reviewers. With the help of this tool, you can start a usability test for your site in two minutes. You need to pay USD 20 for the services. When you send you questions to Feedback Army, they seek responses from their reviewers.
5. Silverback
How about a tool that allows you to capture activities on your site? Well! Silverback allows you to do exactly the same. Silverback runs on Mac OS X Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion with a built-in iSight or some alternative. It does not run on 10.4 and lower. The software is free for 30 days and only US $69.95 to register from then on.
6. UserTesting.com
It is one of the famous testing sites in the world and clients like Yahoo, Google, Apple, Ask, eBay, Facebook, AOL, etc trust this tool. The execution is very simple. UserTesting.com creates a test for you and notifies its user across a region. Representative users from UserTesting panel immediately record themselves using your site and within an hour, it gets usability test video and written answers to your questions. Further, you can also choose your users by Gender, Age, Country, Income, Web expertise, etc.
About 85 per cent of UserTesting users are from America, and 15 per cent are from Canada and UK. These are not company’s employees.
7. Feng-GUI
An interesting tool to predict human behavior towards your site, Feng-GUI allows you to understand “human’s attention and attraction.” Through its attention analysis, “Feng-GUI simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals, and creates heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at.”
This tool can help you improve upon the weak areas on your web page and optimize the layouts. You can improve the performance of you site by analyzing the hot spot on the website.
8. Unbounce
Unbounce will allow you to build and publish landing pages on your customers windows and test your campaigns. According to Unbounce, “Landing pages enable you to produce a more focused message for your ad campaigns than your homepage can ever achieve. This translates directly into higher conversions on your PPC, email, banner and social media campaigns.”
9. Monitor.us
This is perhaps the most interesting app that allows you to view the performance of your site live. With this tool, you can keep an eye on “web applications, databases, site availability and response time, plus your server and network health from anywhere.”
Monitor.us monitors, Website, Network, Server, Cloud, Database, Full-Page Load, App Performance, Mobile and Open Source. This tool is absolutely free.
10. Google PageSpeed Insights
Quite a familiar, this tool provide insight into your site and suggest and recommend things to improve its overall functionality.
11. Browsera
Cross browser compatibility of your site is an important thing. Your site needs to be functioning on all the browsers properly. When you add interactive features on your site, you need to test them on all browsers. Browsera is an effective automated system that “tests and reports cross-browser layout differences and scripting errors on your site,” and update you on all the layouts errors on your site.
12. Perfecto Mobile
With the increasing trends of mobile phones and tablets, you also need to ensure your site is compatible with them all in all geographical locations. Perfecto Mobile’s mobile cloud platform enables you to test your website theme on hundreds of mobile devices – of various manufacturers and models.