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Do you ever want to check a successful competitor’s websites to see where you can do better yourself? Do you come across websites you like and wonder which theme it uses or what code or plugins achieve certain features? Would you like to look behind the scene to use the same on your own site?
Here are some web resources to help you do this easily (without any coding knowledge).
If you come across a WordPress theme you’d like to use yourself, type it’s url at and you’ll find out what it is.
Although WordPress is the most popular software for blogs, websites are powered by many different kinds of platforms and scripts.
Wappalyzer is a browser extension that can find many blog and content management systems, eCommerce platforms, web servers, JavaScript frameworks and analytics tools. Here’s of what it can find. (Note: some of the scripts might be used by the web server and not installed by the website owner.)
Do you like a particular color or the color scheme used by a website?
Upload any image to Pictaculous and this web-based tool will tell you which colors the image uses and suggests color palettes to match.
If you prefer to use downloadable software the Honkiat.com post gives you a good selection to choose from. I use a little software tool called which captures parts of pages as images and includes a color tool and ruler.
The free offers a multitude of tools to analyze websites. Use it to check out your competitors as well as your own sites.
Available for both Firefox and Chrome the SEO Quake Toolbar also offers many useful features to check your competition and to see how you’re doing yourself.
View pagerank and the number of links in various search engines and directories (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Delicious). See how many times a page was retweeted. A Keyword density tool shows you how many times a keyword or phrase is used on a page. Highlight nofollow links. A useful diagnostic tool shows you recommended SEO elements and whether they are present on the page. (Useful for checking your own sites SEO)
The , for Firefox and Chrome, allows you to check various SEO aspects for any webpage you visit. It shows you a page’s Domain Authority and Page Rank and analyzes links to and from a page. You can view page elements and attributes (such as description, tags and headings). View a site’s listings in Google and Bing and its who is information. However, many of the tools are only available to the pro version.
With Scrapbook you can download individual webpages and pages linked to them. You can choose what type of files to include in the download (images, sound, movies, pdf, javascript …).
A sidebar list gives you links to pages you’ve downloaded allowing you to view them in your browser or access the files for editing. While viewing a downloaded page a bottom toolbar appears containing editing tools allowing you to erase parts of a page you don’t want, to highlight areas and then re-save.
It’s useful for keeping copies of pages you want to view again or to download a page full of free images.
Microsoft OneNote is my constant companion while browsing, for taking copies of snippets of information. Anything you copy and paste into OneNote includes the link to the page you copied it from. I’ve written detailed posts about OneNote starting with .
I won’t go into detail about this but as a web developer I find them really useful especially for problem solving. When I first started web building they were invaluable as learning tools.
As well as a download tool, Scrapbook is excellent for checking html and CSS code.
Web Developer Toolbar This toolbar for Firefox and Chrome gives you comprehensive information about a webpage. As well as many tools to check and view html, CSS and java script, it includes tools that are useful even if you don’t know anything about coding. Examples
Last but by no means least comes . Enter an address of a competitor and it will score it out of 10 for key areas such as SEO, social media popularity, accessibility, and validity. Here’s a screenshot of the results for Social Media Examiner:
Each of the elements on the right come with details.
Now I need to go back over this post and add some keywords so that this posts scores well with some of these tools. Out go some of the catchy titles and in comes some repetition.
There are many more tools available but I only recommend those I’ve used myself. If you can recommend any others please let us know by leaving a comment.
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