A Practical Software Directory for Solo Builders
Helping search engines find and understand your website
Keep your pages discoverable, find technical problems and reduce unnecessary work when your website loads.
Tools in this category will help you to...
Create and maintain sitemaps, find broken links and review page information such as titles and descriptions. Other tools reduce image sizes or improve how WordPress delivers pages. Some work independently of your website platform, while others require a WordPress installation. Start with the task you need to address, compare the free allowances and use the reports to guide manageable improvements across your site.
Imagify reduces the file sizes of website images, helping pages load with less data to download. It can compress and resize images and create WebP or AVIF versions. Its WordPress plugin can optimise new uploads and process an existing media library in bulk, while the online application supports sites built on other platforms. A free account provides 20MB of processing each month, with a 2MB limit per image. Paid plans provide larger processing allowances. Enable the WordPress plugin’s backup option to keep original images for restoration. Check the finished images before using them, particularly where sharp text or fine detail matters.
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Pro-Sitemaps is the account-based sitemap service linked from XML-Sitemaps.com. It crawls your website, creates a sitemap and provides a dashboard for reviewing crawl results, broken links and included or skipped URLs. Cloud hosting lets you use a sitemap address supplied by the service, with options for placing files on your own site. The free Basic account handles up to 500 URLs per sitemap. Paid subscriptions add automatic updates, advanced crawler settings and image, video and news sitemaps, with pricing based on site size. It can be useful when you want sitemap management outside your website’s own software, including for sites built from HTML files.
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Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop website crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux. It follows links through your site and reports issues such as broken links, redirects, missing or duplicated page titles and problems with meta descriptions or headings. You can inspect which pages link to an affected URL, export reports and generate an XML sitemap. The ongoing free version crawls up to 500 URLs per run. An annual paid licence allows larger crawls and adds features including saved crawls, scheduling and JavaScript rendering. It provides detailed technical findings, so expect to spend some time learning which reports suit your site.
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WP Rocket is a paid performance plugin for WordPress that helps pages load more efficiently. Page caching stores ready-made copies of pages, reducing repeated work for your hosting server. Other options include removing unused CSS, delaying JavaScript and loading images only when needed. Many settings are applied automatically, with further controls available inside WordPress. These changes can support improvements to loading speed and Core Web Vitals, although results depend on your website and hosting. A 14-day trial requires payment details and becomes paid unless cancelled. Annual licences start at US$59.95 for one website, including updates and support.
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XML-Sitemaps.com is a free online generator for creating a sitemap of up to 500 pages without registering an account. Enter your website address, let the tool follow its public links and download the resulting file. You can then place it on your website and submit its address in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. The service also produces HTML and text versions of your page list. It is suited to a small site where you are happy to regenerate and upload the sitemap after significant changes. Scheduled updates and hosted sitemap management are available through the separate Pro-Sitemaps account service.
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