Bookmarklets for testing your website
I’m at day two of Indie Web Camp Brighton.
Day one was excellent. It was really hard to choose which sessions to go to because they all sounded interesting. That’s a good problem to have.
I ended up participating in:
- a session on POSSE,
- a session on NFC tags,
- a session on writing, and
- a session on testing your website that was hosted by Ros
In that testing session I shared some of the bookmarklets I use regularly.
Bookmarklets? They’re bookmarks that sit in the toolbar of your desktop browser. Just like any other bookmark, they’re links. The difference is that these links begin with javascript: rather than http. That means you can put programmatic instructions inside the link. Click the bookmark and the JavaScript gets executed.
In my mind, there are two different approaches to making a bookmarklet. One kind of bookmarklet contains lots of clever JavaScript—that’s where the smart stuff happens. The other kind of bookmarklet is deliberately dumb. All they do is take the URL of the current page and pass it to another service—that’s where the smart stuff happens.
I like that second kind of bookmarklet.
Here are some bookmarklets I’ve made. You can drag any of them up to the toolbar of your browser. Or you could create a folder called, say, “bookmarklets”, and drag these links up there.
Validation: This bookmarklet will validate the HTML of whatever page you’re on.
Carbon: This bookmarklet will run the domain through the website carbon calculator.
Accessibility: This bookmarklet will run the current page through the Website Accessibility Evaluation Tools.
Performance: This bookmarklet will take the current page and it run it through PageSpeed Insights, which includes a Lighthouse test.
HTTPS: This bookmarklet will run your site through the SSL checker from SSL Labs.
Headers: This bookmarklet will test the security headers on your website.
Drag any of those links to your browser’s toolbar to “install” them. If you don’t like one, you can delete it the same way you can delete any other bookmark.