Website Design and Testing Tools

Summary: Below listed a number of essential/useful tools for website design and testing. Many of them offer free service plans.

Website Testing

Loading Test
loader.io – Loader.io allows you to carry out an online stress test on web-sites/web-apps with up to 50,000 concurrent connections for free.

Accelerate Website

Website Speed
Google PageSpeed Insight – Google PageSpeed Insight will give 2 scores (mobile and desktop) for any webpages with tons of suggestions for further accelerate the website. Though not all suggestions are doable (especially for CMS powered websites), remarkable increase in website speed is often noted after implementing some of the solutions.

Content Delivery Network
Cloudflare – Content Deliver Network (CDN) can be thought of as a network of servers which contain duplicates of your website contents. On every visit to your website, the CDN will automatically choose the server nearest to the visitor to send the website data, thus reducing the traffic time and your server load. CDN is considered a must for large websites. Cloudflare is a CDN provider which offers a free plan for normal http traffic. Webmasters are only required to change the DNS record at their domain registrars to enjoy to accelerated website access brought by a CDN.

UI Design

UI Wireframe
Basiliq Freehand UI Kit – a set of over 300 hand-crafted UI wireframe elements for prototyping mobile applications.

Eyetracking Heatmap Prediction
Attention Wizard helps to predict which part of the page would get most attention through an algorithm which is claimed to be over 70% accurate.

Photoshop/JPEG into Interactive Prototypes
Marvel turns PSD, JPG or PNG images including into interactive prototypes, through real-time sync via Dropbox.

Effects

Parallax
Parallax.js reacts to the orientation of your smart device or the position of the cursor and offsets layers depending on their depth within a scene, creating a parallax (pseudo-3D) effect.

Utilities

Form Generator (with PHP code)
Formbakery provides a WYSIWYG interface for generating professional looking forms in minutes. The download package includes html, css, js and php files. Perfect for adding forms to webpages.

PDF Generator
jsPDF – jsPDF offers browsers the capability of generating PDF files (including landscape/multi-page pdf) on the client side through a javascript library. The best part is that it is compatible with IE6+ with activation of the HTML shim.

Webpage as a presentation
Reveal.js allows you to turn your webpage into an interaction presentation. Visitors can use the mouse or keyboard (arrow buttons) to go to the “next page”.