Support Start > Web Hosting Technical Information > Third Party Test Sites

If you want to test that your site is working properly (particularly if you see some sort of unusual problem and you want to see if it’s just caused by an issue on your computer), you might want to try these independent, third-party sites.

Instant site checks

For a simple test of a website, try TestLocally, LocaSnap and Uptrends. These check your site from many different locations around the world.

Detailed technical tests

We use many of the tools in this section to manually check sites on our own servers (in addition to automated monitoring tools).

WebPageTest shows extremely detailed performance characteristics of your site. (After viewing the results, you might be interested in our pages explaining how to increase browser caching and enable compression.) The Pingdom Website Speed Test and GTmetrix test are similar.

Load Impact allows you to test how much your site slows down when 50 people visit it at once.

If you want to check the DNS settings for your domain name, intoDNS is a great resource we often use ourselves. ZoneMaster and the squish.net DNS checker are similar. What’s My DNS? can query multiple DNS servers around the world.

Site24X7 offers a global ping test and a global website test to verify that your site is reachable from many locations around the world. DNSTools, ping.pe, Mtr from World and Ping-Admin are similar.

If your site uses an SSL certificate, SSLShopper offers an SSL certificate check. Qualys SSL Labs offers a more detailed technical SSL test. (It’s normal not to get a perfect 100 on this test, but it should be at least an “A-”.) ImmuniWeb has a similar test, and SSL-Tools can be used to verify that a site isn’t vulnerable to certain SSL security problems.

You can check some technical details of the HTTP headers sent by a URL on your site using redbot.org.

If you’re considering using a WordPress plugin and you want to check whether it’s reasonably secure, the Plugin Vulnerabilities Security Checker is useful.

Ongoing monitoring services

Services like SiteUptime can check your site for problems at regular intervals.

E-mail blocklist checks

Our spam filtering system uses “blocklists” (among other things) to check whether mail from a certain IP address should be allowed. The Anti-Abuse Project has a page you can use to check any IP address to see if it’s on any blocklists. You can also check the email sending reputation of your domain name on the widely-used Barracuda Reputation system.

You can check for problems with your mail (including SPF, DKIM and DMARC problems) by sending a test message to mail-tester.com.

Web browser appearance checks

If you want to see what your site looks like in many different Web browsers, Browsershots offers a free service that takes lots of screen shots and displays the results.

Testing your own Internet connection

If you’re not sure if your own network connection is working properly, Speedtest.net and Comparitech’s speed test can show if your inbound or outbound connection is having general speed problems.