Our ultimate aim with ManageWP is to centralize everything you could possibly need to manage your WordPress blogs. So rather than having to go to several different locations to get what you need, you log in to one dashboard, and work from it alone.

This is made possible in two ways:

1. We integrate tools with our software (e.g. our rank tracking service)
2. We give you one click access to an external tool

Today we are covering seven external tools that we have given you one click access to. With these tools, you can carry out comprehensive analysis on your site and take care of any potential issues.

Where Do I Find Them?

It’s easy enough – when logged into the ManageWP dashboard, just hover your mouse over whichever site you want to analyze. You’ll see seven links under “Tools”:

These are the seven tools that we will be looking at today.

1. Google Malware Check

Malware is a big issue in this day and age, for more than one reason. Not only is it a potential security threat, it can destroy the content on your site (so be sure to back up regularly!), and it can destroy your rankings in Google. If the big G spots malware on your site, it will be ruthless in removing it from their index.

Because Google treats malware so seriously, it has its own checking tool. If you click on the Google Malware Check link under Tools, you will hopefully be presented with a screen similar to this:

If your site has not been checked recently, you can request a review of your site through Google Webmaster Tools.

2. Google Page Speed

As you will know if you have been reading this blog over the last couple of weeks, we are big on page speed. Studies have shown that the speed at which your website loads can make a huge difference to a multitude of engagement factors.

Google Page Speed is one of our favorite tools for measuring the load speed of your site. Click the link and you’ll be presented with an overall score in addition to a list of recommendations. Alternatively, you can select the “Website performance” link from the same menu and get a combined report from Google and Yahoo (please note that this is currently a beta service).

3. Page Loading Time

If you want to pinpoint the load speed of specific elements on your site, this tool does the job brilliantly:

This tool offers more features than we could possibly cover in this post – the above screenshot barely scratches the surface. But this screen alone allows you to analyze specific “choke points” in your site – there may in fact be server-intensive elements that you can do without.

4. Validate xHTML

Unfortunately, using a content management system such as WordPress often leads to deficiencies in markup. Even if you use a fully compliant theme, you may find problems in a plugin, or a piece of code that you have copied and pasted from an external source.

Use this tool to check whether or not your site is compliant with the latest version of HTML. It will present you with a list of potential issues, with which you can decide whether or not to make amendments.

5. Broken Links Checker

Broken links are the bane of many a website owner. There are few things more frustrating for a blog reader than hitting a 404 error page. As is usually the case, prevention is the best cure, which is where the Broken Links Checker tool comes in.

As standard, the tool will only check your blog’s homepage. However, you can select a recursion depth so that it searches pages that are linked to from the homepage:

A recursion depth of 2 should capture the majority of pages on your blog.

6. Server Headers

This is another tool with far too much functionality to cover in depth here. In a nutshell, it is another powerful analysis tool, that will check everything from meta tags to redirects. For a full list of its capabilities, click here.

7. Backlinks

If you’d like to find out who is linking to your site, this is a great option. It utilizes the Blekko search engine (which filters out spam, content farms and malware) and presents a list of all indexed backlinks. It won’t be a comprehensive list (that doesn’t exist), but it is as good a place to start as any.

This list will include any links that you have created yourself (deliberately or inadvertently), such as with blog comments and forum links.

Are There Any Tools That YOU Would Like To See?

If you regularly use tools such as this that we do not currently link to from the ManageWP dashboard, let us know about it in the comments section and we’ll see what we can do!

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Julia Manzerova