Useful Websites for Web Developers

Many times a blog posts functions as a place where you can write something down so you will be able to find the information later, and that is what this blog post is.  There are a number of useful websites that I have bookmarked or sometimes not, but I want to keep this list all in one place.  If you are a web developer, you probably already know about most or all of these sites.  But if you don't, you might want to check them out as well.

Browserscope (http://www.browserscope.org/)

This site allows you to test the capabilities of your browser as well as see the capabilities for other browsers people have tested.  This does test browser capability, but also gets a little more down into the details than other sites on this list.  For example, it you are wondering how many concurrent network connections a particular browser supports, then this is the site to go to.

HTML5 Test (https://html5test.com/)

More and more browsers support HTML 5 these days, but there are still important differences out there.  This site will not only test your browser, but compare different browsers to each other so you know what capabilities are and are not supported.

Can I Use (http://caniuse.com/)

Another site about what features are available in what browsers.  In this site, you select the feature from the main page and it then takes you to a page showing you what browser versions support that feature.

Modern IE (https://www.modern.ie/en-us)

This site by Microsoft allows you to scan a page to see if you are using any old or deprecated features that you should be uplifting.  What is even better is they have an interface to Browserstack which will take screenshots of your website right from a webpage.

Google PageSpeed Insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

Web performance is a big deal, and PageSpeed Insights quickly scans a target website for front end best practices.  You will get a score for both mobile and desktop page speed as well as mobile usability.  In addition, you will get specific recommendations about how the performance of your site can be improved, along with links to Google's documentation explaining exactly what needs to be done.

The online version of PageSpeed Insights can only target publicly available web sites.  You can also check out the Chrome Extension.  One of the nice things about the extension is that for things like optimized images, the extension will provide you with an already optimized version.

Web Page Test (http://www.webpagetest.org/)

This site allows you to run a performance test against your website from locations around the world.  This is very useful to get some real data about what your performance might look like for someone across the country or across the world.  You get back detailed reports including waterfall charts and a breakdown of the type of data that was loaded.

Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/)

Alexa provides site ranking and demographic data about who is viewing a site.  This is useful for comparing your site to competitors in your categories.  The data provided has an SEO bent.  There is a pay version, but still a good amount of interesting data available for free.

Built With (http://builtwith.com/)

Ever wonder what technologies a web site was using.  Built With scans the site and delivers you a nice report on everything ranging from the web server to JavaScript and CSS libraries used.  Could you get all of this information yourself by inspecting HTTP headers and HTML?  Sure.  But why do that when this site can do it for you.