10 Awesome Free Resources For Web Developers

A list of the top 10 most epic tools and resources for web developers. Website analytics, page speed optimization, security, and other cool stuff!

1. Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a free online service that protects and speeds up your website. It’s fairly simple to set up and the increase in speed is jaw-dropping. Furthermore, it’s protects your site from spam bots and hackers.

Link: https://www.cloudflare.com/

2. Apture

Created by the same people who created Cloudflare, Apture is a mechanism that plugs into your website. The purpose of Apture is to keep visitors on your website for longer by automatically showing them information on anything they select.

Link: http://apture.com/

3. Notepad++

Notepad++ is the god of all text editors when it comes to web development (and programming in general). Notepad++ is great for small to medium scale development. Syntax highlighting, regular expressions and macros are a few of the amazing features Notepad++ has to offer.

Link: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

4. Pagespeed

Developed by Google, Pagespeed is a tool that will analyse websites, find flaws, and suggest improvements, all with the aim of speeding up the site. Pagespeed even optimizes images (that aren’t optimized), javascript and css. Pagespeed is a plugin for Google chrome.

Link: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

5. Html Tidy

Beautify your HTML! Html tidy is a tool that basically organizes your Html code into a much prettier and easier to read form. This will help you find errors in your Html, as well as make your code easier to get into for other developers.

Link: http://tidy.sourceforge.net/

6. Filezilla

Arguably the best ftp client in existance, Filezilla brags tabbed ftp connections, an intuitive interface, and the ability to add bookmark ftp connections. This tool is definitely something every web developer needs.

Link: http://filezilla-project.org/

7. Woopra

An analytics tool that will let you track website visitors in real time. As well as tracking what your visitors are doing, you can also use Woopra to chat to specific visitors. Great for improving sales and visitor satisfaction.

Link: http://www.woopra.com/

8. Smush.It

SmushIt is an image optimizing tool created by Yahoo!. It reduces the file size of images while maintaining the quality of the image itself. I have found this tool to vastly improve the loading time for my websites. Speedy websites are undoubtedly the future of the web, and this tool helps you keep up.

Link: http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/

9. SimpleModal

SimpleModal is a jQuery framework that allows for easy creation of popup windows. The framework allows for you to style the popup window according to your own CSS. As such, you can create popup windows that are unique to the style of your website.

Link: http://www.ericmmartin.com/projects/simplemodal/

10. W3 HTML Validator

An HTML validator created and maintained by the W3 organisation. Using this will show you aspects of your HTML that are incorrectly coded. This will improve your website’s browser compatibility.

Link: http://validator.w3.org/