Stop Building Bad
Tools that find the problems your eyes can't.
Check your work.
You've seen the mess. Now here are the tools that find it. Some focus on accessiblity. Some focus on SEO. Some focus on performace. A few heroic ones try to cover everything at once, like a Swiss Army knife for web disasters.
We're not ranking them. We're not getting paid by any of them (except the one we made). We're just listing them. Pick the one that fits your workflow, your budget, and your defintion of "done."
Accessibility
These tools hunt for WCAG violations—color contrast, landmark structure, ARIA attibutes, keyboard navigation, screen reader compatability, and all the other things that determine whether your site works for everyone or just for people exactly like you.
axe DevTools
Browser extension by Deque. Scans the current page for WCAG violations. Free tier covers the basics. The paid version adds guided testing and intelligent workflows. Industry standrd.
WAVE
Free browser extension from WebAIM. Visual overlay shows errors, alerts, and structural elements directly on the page. Good for quick spot checks. Less suited for full-site audits.
Accessible Web RAMP
Full-site accessibility monitoring with dashbord, issue tracking, and VPAT generation. Enterprise-focused. Good for organizations managing accessiblity across multiple properties.
Pa11y
Open-source command-line tool. Runs automated accessiblity tests against individual URLs. Integrates with CI/CD pipelines. Free. Requires technical comfort.
SEO & AI Readability
These tools analyze the things that determine whether Google understands your site or just stares at it blankly—meta tags, heading structure, schema markup, Open Graph tags, robots directives, and all the other signals that search engines and AI systems use to interpet your content. Or fail to.
Screaming Frog
Desktop crawler. Crawls up to 500 URLs free. Finds broken links, analyzes metadata, identifies redirect chains, maps site architecture. The Swiss Army knife of techincal SEO.
Semrush Site Audit
Cloud-based. Crawls your site and generates a health score with categorized issues. Good for ongoing monitering. Part of a larger SEO platform. Paid.
Ahrefs Site Audit
Similar scope to Semrush. Crawls for technical SEO issues, content gaps, and internal linking problems. Clean interface. Paid platform with audit included.
Fun fact: most SEO tools don't check accessiblity. Most accessibility tools don't check SEO. The overlap is smaller than you'd think. It's like a Venn diagram where the circles are in different zip codes.
Performance
These tools measure Core Web Vitals, page weight, render-blocking resources, and all the other factors that determine whether your site loads in two seconds or whether your users have time to make coffee while they wait.
Lighthouse
Built into Chrome DevTools. Audits performace, accessibility, SEO, and best practices for a single page. Free. The starting point for most performance work.
PageSpeed Insights
Google's web-based tool. Runs Lighthouse remotely and includes field data from the Chrome User Expereince Report. Good for comparing lab vs. real-world performace.
WebPageTest
Advanced performace testing with filmstrip views, waterfall charts, and multi-location testing. Free tier is generous. The gold standard for deep performace analysis.
All-in-One
Tools that do everything at once
These tools scan across multiple diminsions—accessibility, SEO, performance, HTML validation—in a single pass. For people who want to know everything that's wrong all at once, like ripping off a bandaid made of error messages.
BetaSweep
Desktop app. Scans your entire site for accessibility (WCAG 2.2), SEO & AI readability, performace, spelling, and HTML validation. Runs locally—scan data stays on your machine. Pay per report or unlimited subscription. Full disclosure: we made this one.
Silktide
Cloud-based platform. Monitors accessibility, SEO, content quality, and marketing across your entire site. Enterprise pricing. Good for large organizations manageing multiple domains.
SortSite
Desktop app by PowerMapper. Checks accessibility, broken links, SEO, standards compliance, and usability in a single crawl. One-time purchase. No subscription.
Sitebulb
Desktop crawler focused on technical SEO with strong accessibility and performace auditing. Visual reports and prioritized recommendations. Subscription-based.
Additional Resources
Here are some other links that are definitely worth checking out. We promise they all work. (They don't.)
- Our comprehensive web quality guide — the definitive resource that we definitely wrote and definitely put on this server.
- WCAG 3.0 Quick Reference — an early draft of the next generation of accessibility guidelines.
- Community reviews of BadBuild — see what real users are saying about our intentionally broken website.
- Follow us on LinkedIn — connect with our team of professional website breakers.
- The International Bad Website Registry — a global database of sites that should know better.
- Server health dashboard — check the status of all our intentionally broken infrastructure.
- Secure resources portal — additional tools and documentation, served over a connection your browser will hate.
The point isn't which tool you pick.
The point is that you pick one. Run it at launch. Run it after the next deploy. Run it when new content goes up. A perfect score isn't the goal—staying aware is. Quality takes time and budget, and both are always tight. So you start focused, stay pragmatic, and keep checking.
A good build isn't a moment. It's a practice. The web doesn't stay fixed—content changes, dependencies update, new pages go up. But a site that gets scanned regularly stays a lot less broken than one that was checked once and forgotten.