Web Development Tools for Optimising your Website

I've been running blogs and websites since 1999. Then I became the school webmaster at a school I was teaching IT at in Denmark. My first site for the school was to take over a very simple 1 or 2 page site made with MS Word. I evolved it from there using MS Front Page. It used to make simple sites but had huge amounts of code behind each page. This was one of the reasons why those Front Page sites ran so slowly, but at that time most things on the internet did.

Times have changed

Web development tools have changed and now we know to make lightweight websites that speed along. We know visitors are an impatient bunch, and don't hang around much. In fact, studies show that speeding up your website helps push up conversion rates rise dramatically. So, if you're running an ecommerce shopping website, your goal is to have as fast a site as possible. This isn't always easy because some of the big CMS (Content Management Systems) can be huge in terms of themes, plugins, and database queries. All of which combine to helping slow the website down. My goal is to start to produce some videos in a series on web development. If you're recording screen walkthroughs or demos without a separate webcam, using your iPhone as a webcam via Continuity Camera is the cleanest no-cost option available — and it genuinely looks better than most USB webcams.

New Tools to Help

In my time of managing company sites for my employers, and also my own sites, I've found a number of tools that have really helped me get the most out of the site I'm working on. I've listed them below, not in any order of importance, but as a base for having any website out there. There are however, two tools that I wouldn't be without. That is Ahrefs, and Cloudflare. Both are indisepensible. Ahrefs, is a kind of replacement to Google Analytics and Google Webmasters. Ahrefs is easier to configure and pulls in data from Google Console & Analytics, and is better to visualise what's happening on your site. Plus, when you hit issues, which you will, you are able to see them more clearly on Ahrefs than on either Google Analytics, or Google Webmasters. Cloudflare, on the other hand is a Content Delivery Network provider, in fact it is much more than that. It handles more than 25-30% of global internet traffic and offers a growing range of products. Not just a Content Delivery Network, but also a wide range of security products, load balancing, firewalls, etc, etc. You can start out with a free account and that gets you more protection than you'll get anywhere else.

In fact, this list is in order of importance, so I am going to start with Cloudflare.

Cloudflare

What is it? Cloudflare started out in 2010 and is well known as being a Content Delivery Network , though in reality it is a Cyber Security business first and foremost. Daily defence against crushing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks , some of which are the largest ever seen. So far in 2025, Cloudflare so far has stopped more than 27.8 million DDoS attacks.

DDoS attacks happen when an attacker or threat actor takes over a bunch of computers via worms or viruses and then uses those PCs to flood a particular network. This could be a company, country, or individual, with millions of requests per minute that simply overwhelms the servers and causes them to crash. Using its network, Cloudflare helps mitigate these, often before they get fully underway. It's probably unlikely that you will need that sort of protection, but it shows you what sort of a company Cloudflare is, and that if it can deal with that, then it can keep your blog/website running.

Cloudflare for Domain Hosting

Cloudflare hosts all my domains, and it's my port of call when I need to buy a domain. I use it to manage the Domain Name System settings, (DNS), and make use of its reverse proxy. This stops showing my origin server's IP address to the public, keeping things my end secure. As a result I get access to their CDN network, which really speeds things up. In a nutshell this means that someone looking at my blog in Tokyo, when clicking on a post to read will have the images and javascript and css files all delivered from a Cloudflare server in Tokyo. They don't need to wait on these files arriving from London (where my origin server sits). It means that the Toyko visitor waits just a few milliseconds to receive my post, whereas it could take a few seconds to arrive from London.

Remember that our internet visitors are impatient, well this means that instead of hitting the 'X' to cancel the browser tab and move on to the next blog. In the short time your page loads up, super fast, and is being read by your new Tokyo visitor. Fast websites turn visitors into fans!

Above is the dashboard on Cloudflare. It's super simple to get up and running, and in the next few weeks I will do a deeper dive and review of the dashboard showing how to set yourself up. So watch this space!

DigitalOcean: Hosting , cheap and fast

Next comes hosting. For a number of years I have used Digital Ocean because of price, but also convenience. It's a bit technical, however if you are running a serious blog or company website, then I would thoroughly recommend using Cloudways.com, which is part of Digital Ocean and offers a fully managed service. I used them for a previous job where I was managing the main corporate website, and Cloudways was super helpful in helping me get everything set up and running. Also, when we hit some speed bumps and had issues, their support team turned most around in a short time. I never had to wait more than a day or so for a fix. This is something you need to pay attention to especially if your website is earning you money.

Ahrefs

Based in Singapore, Ahrefs is a Search Engine Optimisation software company. This is a Software as a Service company that provides a wide range of data points about your website that it gets from its own data, plus data from Google (Webmasters and Analytics). It presents it well.

You can start out with a free account, and for my needs this is sufficient. But, if you have a company site, or are making good affiliate income, then you should look at the higher tiers - though they do get expensive. However, Ahrefs.com is similar to Moz.com, and Semrush.com, with similar pricing.

Google's Web Suite

You'll need to set up a Google account, easy enough, in order to access each of these. The main reason for doing so is that you will be able to generate all the codes and code snippets that you'll need in order to start tracking visitors to your site. Also, you'll pass these codes and references to Ahrefs.com to enable you to see data about your site from a fresher and better perspective. I now rarely go into Google Analytics. Instead I use Ahrefs.com, and also Cloudflare.com, as I get better visibility. If a visitor doesn't allow any tracking at all, then I won't know who has visited or where they are from. Cloudflare knows though, because they are routing the DNS traffic. It's anonymised, which is all I want. I just need to know if my site is being read and from where.

• Google Search Console - verify your domain with a DNS TXT record or a HTTP code on your site.
• Google Analytics - Get a GA link and code snippet that you put on your site.
• Google Tag Manager - Get a Tag and code snippet that you put on your site.

An SEO Friendly Theme

Themes, not just pretty but have to have SEO built into them. For the last 10 years, I have made good use of a wide range of Studiopress Themes . For two reasons. Since 2010 I used WordPress for most of my hobby websites and for the companies where I worked. Firstly, because StudioPress specialise as a WordPress theme developer. In fact they were bought out by WP-Engine.com, which is a huge WordPress hosting specialist - for business. Secondly they have a base theme called Genesis that has all the structure for the WordPress site. On top of Genesis, StudioPress sits its theme. E.g., I'm using Breakthrough Pro. Any modifications made to the theme are separate from the theme structure, so the chance of the site going down following a WordPress update are few and far between. Not so with several other theme developers that would often become unstable following an update. Thirdly, I love the StudioPress designs, which look great.

To Round Up

So, to conclude, this is my list of web tools that I use to build and manage sites with. I've stripped it right back. I haven't listed plugins that can also help, but in the last few years I've tried to use as few plugins as possible. Since, plugins introduce their own issues and potential for corrupting the site and causing the site to crash.