ICYMI: Test Your Store With These Free Tools

At Your Store Wizards, one of our goals is to make sure our client’s stores are up-to-date with whatever changes the search engines and service providers throw our way that can impact visibility.  At the same time, we’re always looking for ways to help store owners save time managing their store.

With that in mind, today I’m highlighting two free tools that every store owner should run their store through and one time-saving utility that will change the way you edit your store.

Free Tool #1 – SSL Tester
It wasn’t too long ago that sitewide SSL was rolled out for Yahoo! Stores.  In order to provide visitors with a 100% secure session, links that reference http instead of https, javascript, and other elements need to be updated prior to enabling SSL.

Many store owners came to us asking if their store is ready for SSL and for the majority, the answer was no.  Old code, old links, and hard-coded image calls to http, would result in visitors receiving a security warning.

Our SSL Tester is designed to crawl your store and look for elements that need to be updated.  If there are none, you’re good to go and you can move forward with enabling SSL.  If there are issues, the tool will let you know what they are so they can be corrected.

Having SSL enabled sitewide is crucial!  If you’ve been putting it off, don’t wait any longer – especially with the holidays right around the corner.  Plus, Google has confirmed that https is a ranking factor for SEO.

To access the SSL Tester, click here.


Free Tool #2 – Favicon Tester
As detailed in this blog post, Google recently started including favicons in mobile search results.  This little tweak provides site owners with compliant favicons additional visibility in the results – and that’s a good thing!

Our favicon tester will show whether or not your favicon is up to standard.

Our favicon tester will show whether or not your favicon is up to standard.

But for many store owners, their favicon is old, not the correct size, or doesn’t meet the requirements for showing up in the search results.

Our Favicon Tester is designed to check your favicon against the specific requirements set by Google and let you know whether or not it needs to be updated.

To access the Favicon Tester, click here.


Free Tool #3 – Magic Edit Button
Our third tool is more of a helper and definitely a time-saver for any store owner.  The Magic Edit Button is a bookmarklet that you can quickly install in your web browser and gives you instant access to edit a page on your website in just a click.

How does it work?  Like magic, of course!  Once installed, if you’re browsing your store and you see something on a page that needs to be edited, there’s no need to log into your store’s control panel and navigate through to the editor.  All you do is click the Magic Edit Button on your bookmarks bar and you’re taken to the page in your store editor.

Magic Edit works for Yahoo! Store, Shopify, Big Commerce and WordPress.

For more information and to install the Magic Edit Button, click here.


There you have it, three tools that should be in every store owner’s toolbox!  We’re always looking for ideas on tools like these, so if you have any suggestions, email them to me at scott@yourstorewizards.com!

Happy Selling!

Scott Sanfilippo
General Manager, YSW

 

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