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🧰 Your Website's Health Check: 3 Essential Tools
Published about 6 hours ago • 5 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week: website essentials.
Managing a website can sometimes feel like juggling chainsaws. There are so many moving parts, and when something goes wrong, it can go very wrong. I've learned this the hard way over the years at Tooltester – e.g. a small code change can send your site offline quickly.
This week, I’m sharing three essential tools that help me sleep better at night, knowing my online projects are safe, running smoothly, and that everything is being tracked.
Plus: a brilliant off-topic tool for those remote work emergencies, a simple hack to keep your Google Docs organized, and a hilarious story about an AI police report.
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TinyPNG is one of those small tools that quietly makes a huge difference to your website. It compresses your images (PNG, JPG, and so on) so they’re much smaller in file size without any noticeable loss in quality. For you, this means a lighter website, faster loading times, and potential SEO gains.
If you happen to have a WordPress site, you’re in luck, because they have a simple plugin that will scan your website and run a few image optimizations that would take you days to perform manually.
In fact, I use TinyPNG to compress all the images I upload to this newsletter – there’s no need to send you emails with 5MB images and clutter your already crowded inbox.
When it comes to your website, your hosting is the foundation. A shaky foundation means a shaky website, and that’s a recipe for disaster. That’s why I always recommend choosing a reliable hosting provider like HostPapa.
HostPapa is a great option for WordPress hosting. They offer features designed to make your life easier, like fast storage for quicker loading times, staging areas to test code updates and big changes, and a CDN to speed up content delivery globally.
On top of that, HostPapa is a large hosting provider with a wide range of products, including VPS and dedicated hosting plans, domain registration services, and even professional email hosting.
There's a silent killer that can sabotage your website without you even knowing it: downtime. It's happened to me more times than I'd like to admit. You're busy with other things, and your website is quietly offline, losing visitors, clients and money.
That's why I learned the hard way that an uptime monitor is an absolute must-have. UptimeRobot is my go-to for this. It’s a simple, reliable tool that keeps an eye on my websites 24/7 and alerts me the instant one of them goes down – with notifications via email, SMS, voice call, Slack, and more.
The free plan is very generous, offering 50 monitors with 5‑minute checks, which is more than enough for most people. It also includes useful extras like a public status page you can share with your users and API access if you’d like to use it programmatically.
🛠️ Alternative to: Pingdom, StatusCake, Better Uptime
If you want people to find your website, you need to be on Google's good side. And the best way to do that is to use Google Search Console. It's a free tool from Google that gives you a ton of information about how your site is performing – rankings, technical issues, keywords, and more.
It's like having a direct line to Google, telling you exactly how your SEO efforts are performing. However, I'm not a big fan of Google Search Console or how difficult it is to navigate. One thing I tried was connecting Google Search Console with the help of Codex (or Claude Code) – it worked really well.
Let me explain. Google Search Console has an API you can use to get information – and yes, you're right, this is pretty geeky and I wouldn't know where to start on my own. Now, using Codex or Claude Code, I can ask the agent to run these API calls in the background and generate custom PDF reports I review every Monday.
Ever needed to access your work computer from home, or help a friend with a tech issue from miles away? I’ve been there, and it’s usually a pain. But then I found AnyDesk, and it’s been a game-changer.
AnyDesk is a remote desktop application that lets you connect to another computer securely and easily. It's incredibly fast, with almost no lag, and it works on pretty much any platform you can think of: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS.
I’ve used it to grab files from my desktop when I’m on the go, and to help my mum with her computer problems. You could even use it to collaborate with colleagues on projects.
If you ever need to access a computer remotely, I can't recommend AnyDesk enough. It's simple, reliable, and the free version is fairly generous.
🛠️ Alternative to: TeamViewer, Chrome Remote Desktop, Splashtop
If you’re anything like me, your Google Docs can get a little… chaotic. Long documents with a dozen different sections can quickly become a nightmare to navigate. But there’s a simple trick I recently discovered that can help you get more organised.
Google Docs has a built-in outline view that automatically generates a table of contents based on your headings – not big news there. To use it, just go to `View > Show outline`. Now you can jump to any section of your document with a single click.
But here’s the real pro tip: you can also create “tabs” in Google Docs by clicking the “+” button (see image above). You can then create additional docs with a checklist, add notes, or whatever you need. I like to use this to keep all the documents for the same project inside one Google Docs file.
It's a small thing but it makes a huge difference in keeping my documents organized and easy to navigate.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
Heber City Police in Utah were testing a new AI-powered report-writing tool when something… unexpected happened. During one dispatch, the AI picked up audio from the Disney movie “The Princess and the Frog” playing in the background, and wrote in the official report that an officer had turned into a frog 🐸
Officers had to manually edit the report to clarify that none of their colleagues were, in fact, amphibians. A sergeant from the department said the incident was a valuable lesson in the importance of double-checking AI-generated reports. You can read the full story here.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll take a look at how to generate video with AI, so you can create stunning visuals without needing a film crew.
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly. Hola friend 👋, I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort. This week: the tools that power remote teams. Here at Tooltester, we’re a (mostly) remote company. Although we’re headquartered in Barcelona, we have team members all over Spain and even in Germany. And of course, there's usually someone traveling. This setup gives us a lot of freedom, but it also means we need to...
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