The follow are some of the free online tools I use regularly in my daily cadence for e-commerce & digital marketing.
Project Management
- ClickUp
The most efficient Project and task management tool I’ve used.
- Confluence
The easiest project documentation tool in the market.
Web Hosting
- Nexcess WordPress Hosting
The best web hosting support I’ve ever received. I’ve used over 20 different hosting providers since 1998.
- Who Is Hosting This?
An awesome tool that shows where any given website is hosted, the hosting provider, its IP Address, name servers and a link to its WHOIS.
SEO
- Ahrefs
This tool allows you to track your backlinks, keywords, brand mentions and know what your competitors are doing.
- Magestic
Link intelligence tools for SEO and Internet PR and Marketing. Site Explorer shows inbound link and site summary data.
- Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler, that allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key elements to analyse and audit technical and onsite SEO.
- Moz
Formerly known as SEOMoz, Moz is a well-known and multi-faceted tool for SEO and Social Media.
- Google Shopping Taxonomy (Official Google Category List)
This is the complete and latest version of the official Google Product Category list
- Gootax – Google Shopping Taxonomy (Third-Party Tool)
This third-party tool gets the data from the official Google Shopping Category text file but is a tool that allows you to search by keywords to help you quickly find and narrow category selection.
Paid Search
- SpyFu
I’ve been using SpyFu since the Beta days. Their tool has evolved so well and I prefer it over SEMRush. The data and UX is straight forward and makes it easy for anyone to understand.
- SEMrush
SEMrush is a powerful and versatile competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research.
- 120 Google Ads Scripts
A great post with a list of links showing 120 Google Ads scripts to “supercharge” your Google Ads campaigns.
- Optmyzer
Optmyzer is a paid web-based product that gives you automated tools that helps you manage and optimize your Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Google Merchant accounts. A true time saver.
Web Analytics
- Supermetrics
This link to GA shows you how to implement Custom Dimensions from Google Analytics into your website/ecommerce.
- Quantcast
This tool provides free audience demographics measurement and delivers real-time advertising.
- GA Regex Tester
This utility provides real-time feedback on your regular expressions before you insert them into a filter in Google Analytics.
- How to Track Custom Dimensions in Google Analytics
This link to GA shows you how to implement Custom Dimensions from Google Analytics into your website/ecommerce.
UX / Workflow
- Miro
Miro has been one of my best friends connecting the dots with tech stacks and creating workflows to help organizations understand how things work and identifying opportunities to optimize processes.
- Mouseflow
Great alternative to Optimizely and CrazyEgg for understanding user-interaction behavior.
Digital Media Buying
- Omni Calculator
Allows you to calculate or reverse calculate CPM based on Cost, Impressions, and CPM
Design
- Grab Website Colors
This tool gives you the ability to extract the hexadecimal color palette of any website.
- Color-Hex
This is a nifty tool that allows you to experiment with hexadecimal color values, discover and create color palettes.
Video Production
- Carol K
Talented motion graphics production artist
Voice Over Production
- Anna Y
Talented voice over artist
Stock Photos & Photography
- Pexels
This site is what we’ve all been waiting for. Free stock photos! Just bookmark it and use it.
- FreeImages.com
Formerly SXC.HU, a couple of years after it was acquired by Getty Images, they completely changed the site’s interface. It’s likely the web’s largest collection of free stock photos but promotes lots of premium stock photos by Getty Images.
- Lighting Diagram Creator
Photography lighting diagrams made easy with this online tool: use the drop down menus, select objects, drag them, rotate them, change their layers then export your diagram to JPEG or save its URL.
Development
- BuiltWith
Very useful tool that gives you insight into what makes any website run. ie. which platform does it use to power its ecommerce site?
- GenerateWP
The easiest and the fastest way to create custom and high quality code for your WordPress project using the latest WordPress coding standards and API’s.
- ViewPortSizes
Use this handy tool to help with your responsive design & mobile web apps.
- CSS Media Sizes
Helpful tool gives you proper CSS media sizes
- Viewport Emulator
This fantastic tool shows what your website will look like on pretty much every mobile or desktop device. No need to send screenshots anymore, just load the URL from this tool then share the completed URL to others on your design team.
- PHP Code Checker
Use this quick tool to check your PHP code & syntax
- Responsinator
Simple, yet highly useful tool to let you preview responsive designs
- Animate.CSS
Free to use JQuery-based CSS animation library compilation
WordPress Plugins
- GravityForms WordPress Plugin
The best custom form maker for WordPress.
- Knowledge Base Q&A WordPress Plugin
The best knowledgebase and Q&A plugin for WordPress. Ever.
.htaccess
- htaccessTools
Great resource for everything .htaccess related like the .htpasswd Generator tool
Domains
- Check MX Records for your Domain
Useful to check if you’ve made changes to your website mail system. ie. Switching from your default web hosting email to gmail apps for business.
- Check .CA WHOIS
.ca domains are treated differently and other whois checkers don’t provide all the information.
- Check DNS Record Propogation
Easy to use tool that allows you to check which parts of the world see your updated Name Server changes.
Links
- Backlink Tools
List of 100 backlink checker tools.
- Broken Link Checker
Checks all the pages on your site for broken links; both internal and external.
Monitoring
- Website Uptime & Performance Monitoring
Useful to automatically notify you by email if your website goes down and email you when its running again.
Performance
- Website Speed Test
Test the loading time of your website and identify key problem areas to help you speed things up.
SSL
- Why No Padlock?
Pulling your hair out trying to find out why your secure page is not fully secure? Here’s a simple tool that will tell you about any insecure items on your SSL page.
- SSL Checker
Helps diagnose problems with your SSL certificate installation. You can verify the SSL certificate on your web server to make sure it is correctly installed, valid, trusted and doesn’t give any errors to any of your users.
- Free SSL
Get a free SSL for non-commercial use.
Social
- Clear Facebook Posting Cache
When you copy and paste a link in the status, that link’s title, description and photo is cached. So, when you update the link and paste the link again, Facebook still uses the old version. This tool will clear your Facebook cache so you can use the updated link.
- Ban Someone From Liking your Facebook Page
There’s always going to be bad people liking your page. They’re unwanted and don’t respect your community you’ve built.
Passwords
- MD5 Hash Generator
Used to encrypt passwords for MySQL databases