Essential Tools for website owners, digital marketers, and developers

In this article, I share a list of essential tools that can be used by website owners, digital marketers, and developers. Over the years, they’ve all saved me time, money, and stress.

Each tool in this list is fantastic, and the creators behind them should be recognised, acknowledged, and thanked profusely for building and sharing them.

I will be adding tools to this list regularly, so be sure to come back now and then to ensure you don’t miss any new additions!

Useful tools for digital marketers and developers

Redirect Tools

Redirects can be one of the biggest pain points for digital marketers and developers alike, making the following tools essential additions to your workflow.

It’s of the utmost importance that you thoroughly test redirects as you create them, then confirm they work after implementing the changes.

I’d also recommend you check your redirects on a regular basis to ensure they’re all working as expected, that you’re not losing any backlink juice, and that redirect chains are kept to a minimum.

Htaccess Tester

Htacces Tester is a really useful tool to test your htaccess rewrites, created by the team at MadeWithLove.com

After you provide a source URL, you are presented with a textarea form field to add and modify your htaccess rules as required.

htaccess tester request screenshot

And after clicking the “Test” button, you are presented with a resulting Output URL field displaying the final destination URL, along with a view displaying Debugging info showing which rules were skipped and/or matched.

htaccess tester response screenshot

HTTPStatus.io – Bulk testing redirects

HTTPStatus.io makes it quick and easy to check status codes, response headers, and redirect chains.

You can also bulk test URLs, which dramatically speeds up the redirect testing process. You do this by pasting in as many URLs as required but ensuring only one URL per line.

HTTPStatus.io bulk request screenshot

After adding our set of test URLs, we click the “Check Status” button.

Scrolling down the page, we see a table, with each row containing the Request URL, the Status Codes, and a count of how many redirects are found in the redirect chain.

When hovering on each non-200 status code response, you are presented with a tooltip showing the resulting redirect URL value in sequence until it finally reaches the desired 200 response code.

HTTPStatus.io redirect response screenshot

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