Usability is a crucial part of running a successful website. Broken links, bad contrast, text blocks, over-complicated designs, technical clutter . . . these can spell death for both website traffic and sales conversions. The good news, however, is that these issues are enough of a problem that hundreds of tools now exist to assist with the process of properly testing a website.

Related: Stop Being Such a Tight Wad. Invest In a Great Website.

While certain process are worth putting money and effort into (for example, hiring testers to do a thorough check and recheck, and to do proper split testing), some things can be handled for free.

Here are ten useful tools to get you started. At the very least, they can point you in the right direction so you know where to spend your budget.

1. WhatFix

Always be there when your user needs you: WhatFix allows you to create interactive flows explaining any part of your site: You can create multiple flows and use them as the non-intrusive widget. A flow is the step-by-step explanation of what should be done on the current page. WhatFix is free, with the option to upgrade to create self-hosted customized flows.

2. Color Oracle

Is your site optimized for people with color blindness? You might not think it is worth catering to such a small sliver of the population, but there are more people suffering from color perception issues than you think. According to Color Blindness Awareness, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have color awareness problems, which means a fair percentage of your users are going to have trouble seeing colors in your design.

Color Oracle is an overlay filter that you can use on any art or designs to make sure your colors can be perceived by anyone who visits.

3. Paletton

Speaking of colors, you don’t want to consider just color blindness. You also want to make sure your colors mesh as well as you assume they will. Given some of the horrible color choices even official brands choose for their websites, logos and products, color choice is too frequently ignored. Indeed, this important choice is typically reserved for when customers tick off those psychological association boxes companies rely on more than they do common sense.

Having garish or uncomfortable colors will make viewing your site harder for the user. Paletton makes it easy to find the best combinations of colors, tones and shades.

Related: 5 Things That Belong on the Front Page of Your Website

4. Cyfe

Create your own site performance and usability dashboard to monitor how your site is serving users. Your usability dashboard can aggregate the data from the following built-in tools: Google Analytics (to spot any weird activity), Pingdom (to monitor the down time) and ZenDesk (to monitor your customer team stats).

In addition, you can add widgets for any RSS feed (for example, your brand-name mentions, to track questions from customers), and any Google spreadsheet. (You can also use Google Docs to aggregate notes from your team.) The cool thing about Cyfe is that you can see all these widgets on one page to get a handy bird’s-eye view of all the aggregated data.

5. Page Speed

Site speed is important, because if your site doesn’t load well, people won’t bother to use it. This is especially true in today’s age, when high speed Internet is in almost every household, and available on every mobile device. Page Speedwill analyze your web page speed, and diagnose problems that might be slowing it down. All you have to do is put in your URL.

If you are wondering how your site downtime looks like compared to that of other sites, here are up-to-date uptime stats for you to dig in. These stats are updated every month to show you the biggest losers and winners when it comes to hosting service uptime.

6. Pingdom

If you are worried about bottlenecking, this is a great tool. Pingdom will isolate any bottlenecks that are impacting speed or causing pages to loop. Pingdom has a subscription service that will automatically test your site every day, so you will be alerted to any issues that crop up the moment they are detected. That is a paid service, but basic testing is free. As mentioned above, I use Cyfe to monitor my site downtime.

7. Spur

Get an honest critique on your design choices, with Spur. You put in your URL, and Spur runs it against classic design principles to tell you what ”rules” you are violating. You will be able to see what does and does not work. Then you can get a further critique from community members, sharing the original and the changed designs, based on their recommendations.

8. Feedback Form

WordPress is a platform of choice for many due to the many plugins that you can use to customize the website for free. Feedback Form is one of those invaluable ones that everyone should install. You can create simple forms in various styles that ask your users directly about ways you can improve usability.

What better way to find out than to go straight for the source? This is only one of many customizable feedback form generators out there for WordPress.

If your site runs on WordPress, here are a few more must-have WordPress plugins to install, including WP Super Cache for better load time and Gravity Forms for more feedback form options.

9. Chalkmark

Chalkmark is a really cool way of crowdsourcing usability and design feedback. You provide a design screenshot, and people on the site leave you notes. It is all based on first-click, so you get fresh impression opinions every single time. The information is then put into a visual format as a heatmat, so you see for yourself where people clicked, avoided and created the most traffic. It is easy to use, and highly effective. You won’t find a better way to get mass opinions all in one place.

10. Five Second Test

Five Second Test focuses on two things: landing pages, and calls to action. It quickly evaluates your design to tell you whether these components are being properly optimized. From there, it gives you actionable tips on how to improve, as well as alerts about serious problems that have to be addressed.

Usability is all about first impressions, which is where the term comes from. You have to be able to hook the attention of users within the first five seconds of their landing on your page, or your site is not doing its job.

Do you have any tools to put on this list? We would love to hear about them, so let us know in the comments!

Related: How to Build a Multi-Platform Website

The lone wolf gets a lot of guff for separating from the pack, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, separating yourself is exactly what you should be doing. The startup world is remarkably competitive, and about 90 percent of startups will fail.

Not a fun statistic — I know.

Chances are likely that your business exists among a large wolf pack of startups that all seemingly provide the same service. This is frustrating when you know that you are providing an important product. You know it’s different from other products because you have spent months — even years — creating it, but customers haven’t had that time. They’ve only just met you, so unfortunately, you run the risk of looking identical to a service they already use or know of.

Related: If You Build It, They Will Not Come

Take the companies Customer.io and MailChimp, for example. At first glance, each of these companies specialize in sending email. Looking at their features, prices, testimonials and even benefits, a new user would have no problem choosing one by randomly drawing from a hat. However, at a closer look, you begin to see what sets them apart. You begin to learn about their core value, and suddenly you’re seeing them in a new light.

For example, it turns out that Customer.io is known for making it easy to send emails to your customers who are already using your app. Their main focus is to help you communicate better with your customers, in a tailored way, personalized to what the customer is already doing in the app. On the other hand, MailChimp is focused on email marketing and making it easy to send email newsletters to anyone you might have on your email list. This core value sets them apart, and once you see it, the two products couldn’t be more different.

Based on their core values, one is more concerned with growth, while the other focuses on retention. Depending on your company’s strategy, you can make an educated decision between the two.

How Wistia broke from the pack of video hosting sites

A recent study shows that 1.8 million words have the same impact as a one-minute video. That’s about 150 days of writing that can all be packaged into one tiny video. So it’s no coincidence that a myriad of video hosting companies have entered the startup scene in the last 10 years.

Wistia is a company that knows better than anyone the trials and tribulations of feeling overshadowed in a massive wolf pack, as there are several other video platforms offering basic video hosting functionality. With this kind of competition, how do you set yourself apart? How do you break off from the wolf pack and find success in your own adventure? Moreover, technology is constantly changing. How do you market a reliable product when software is bound to go through countless features and continuously evolve?

The answer to these questions boils down to one simple concept — a gold mine that makes people trust that you have just the product they need. Just four years ago, Wistia was doing everything they could to market their product to as many people as possible. They would advertise the features of their video platform left and right, which essentially resulted in a crazy marketing spider web that muddled the overall essence of their product.

You can list feature after feature and spout benefit after benefit, but if there isn’t one unified idea to umbrella that under, people are going to miss out on that “aha!” moment that will make them recognize the value of your product.

Related: 3 Tips for Building a Business That Reflects Your Deepest Values

This idea will form your core value — all you need is a mission and a vision. Here are three ways to get there:

1. Establish your mission to help your customers.

Wistia co-founder and CEO Chris Savage highly encourages companies to write down their mission as a way to focus on what it is you are trying to help your audience do. You mission is something that will establish who you are and will convey your passion for your product. Writing it down and ingraining it in your marketing strategy will change the way that people see your product. This is why Wistia markets to their mission as opposed to their product.

Before establishing a mission, Wistia was marketing to their product. This means that they were sharing all that their product had to offer without really providing a basis for what exactly it was they were offering. Chris couldn’t quite figure out why they weren’t growing, but once they established a company mission, they saw everything about their marketing transform for the better.

Wistia’s mission is to empower people to use video. Knowing this, they don’t make any marketing decisions that contradict this statement, and this resulted in a significantly broader range of content they could produce. Just look at their blog. It’s chock-full of fun content including actionable tips on how to make your videos more accessible using captions, improved tools for your video library management, how to create visual stories with a B-roll, and much more.

This content fits under their mission because it’s helping their users get the most out of making their own videos.

2. Define your vision to differentiate your product.

Having a mission is great, but when it stands alone, it can seem rather static. It’s also important to look toward the future and set goals for your company. Wistia has done this by defining their vision. Your vision is something that differentiates your product from everything else on the market.

Wistia came to their vision by realizing that people were using their product for a multitude of reasons — marketing, internal training, collaboration etc. — which looks great, but also makes it really hard to focus on everything. They realized that what it came down to was that Wistia was built for video marketing. You could use Wistia for everything that people had already been using it for, but it was built for video marketing.

The introduction of Turnstile on Wistia was what really set their vision in motion. Turnstile is a tool that lets you identify leads and capture emails through your video. Unsurprisingly, people saw Turnstile and suddenly realized why Wistia was different from other video-hosting platforms. No other video hosting platform was allowing you to run analytics, capture leads andcapture emails through the video on your site. Wistia’s clients could get actionable data telling them what segments of their videos people were watching.

It’s their video marketing that sets them apart.

3. Market your core value to build an educated and loyal consumer base.

Once you have established the two tenets that make up your core value, marketing will naturally become a lot easier, and the period of time from when someone learns about your product to having an “aha!” moment will get shorter and shorter.

Once Wistia established their mission and defined their vision, they started integrating this language into everything and began their solo journey away from the rest of the pack. Their external marketing emphasized that they were a video-marketing platform, and their content made people feel empowered to use video as a tool. Internally, they implemented their core value into the ways they thought and talked about their company out loud and on their site.

Suddenly, Wistia found themselves a proud lone wolf.

Related: What Volkswagen Can Teach You About Values-Based Marketing

When it comes to startups, risk comes to mind for many. But not taking that leap poses a greater risk — the risk of missing a great opportunity for compensation, personal growth and networking galore. Choosing to accept startup risk — as a founder or early employee — could fundamentally alter your life and career, and quite frankly, I think you should do it.

Building a startup isn’t as risky as it sounds, it just requires a trade off of some short-term pain for long-term gain. Here are some initial pains I went through when building my company, so you can be ready when starting yours or joining your first new venture:

Related: 4 Steps to Taking Calculated Risks That Move Your Business Forward 

Short-term pain #1: Little to no pay

When I first started The Bouqs Co., I took no pay for eight months. Zero dollars. And I’m no spring chicken. I had a 15-year career at Bain & Co and Disney, a new mortgage in Los Angeles and a 1-year-old boy at home.

Ouch.

This kind of sacrifice is common in the beginning stages of a startup. Founders often sacrifice their pay to fund what needs funded, betting they’ll get it back (and more) later. And due to necessity, most startups pay below market in salary in early stages, asking employees to focus on equity upside instead.

Short-term pain #2: More hours

Startup founders and early employees work more hours than almost anyone — except maybe bankers. For example, at the launch of XYZ Co., two to three people will be the only ones running the entire operation. That’s a lot of work per employee. As funding and demand increase for XYZ Co., the team will expand to six then 10 then 20 and so on.

The trouble is, no matter the number of people on XYZ Co.’s team, the work is never less. Nothing about XYZ Co. existed in its early days, so it requires an incredible amount of time and energy to give it life and sustain it. This means many hours split among few people — and it’s a grind.

Short-term pain #3: The fear it might not work out

The founding team works long hours for little or no pay, barely scraping by for months. Regardless of their Herculean effort, there’s no guarantee the company will succeed. There’s a constant fear in the back of everyone’s mind that they are sacrificing all they have for something that may ultimately fail.

That kind of stress paired with early mornings, late nights and lack of funds is usually what scares away would-be entrepreneurs. But it’s just fear. It’s not reality. While there’s no guarantee it will work, there’s also no guarantee it won’t.

Related: What the High Dive Can Teach Entrepreneurs About Dealing With Fear

And ultimately, it isn’t real risk. Regardless of the outcome, the gains will likely outweigh these pains. Here’s how you win, regardless of whether your startup results in an initial public offering or a closing of the business:

Long-term gain #1: Compensation growth and equity

While founders and early employees may start out making below-market salary for their skills, when the company gets big, they’ll be making more than they would have in their alternative reality non-startup company. At a startup, founders automatically step into senior management roles, skipping over the traditional rise up the ladder. As the company grows, early employees naturally move into higher management positions. Since they helped build the company from the ground up, they’ve earned the seniority needed to lead newer employees.

Additionally, the equity value in a successful startup can be more than enough to offset any short-term decreases in pay in the beginning. As a startup accrues value, equity value grows to exceed what early team members would make as employees at regular day jobs.

Long-term gain #2: Not much is actually lost — even in failure

Even if the business fails, not much money is lost by an employee or founder in the grand scheme of things. Let’s say Sara tries to build a startup. She makes nothing. Zero dollars. Zilch. Six months later, it fails. Take the lost wages (half of one year’s salary at the next best alternative job) and divide it by all the money she will make in her career. It’s just a tiny portion.

The losses, while real, are mitigated by the short time frame in which startups make it or break it.

Long-term gain #3: Learning at a fast-forward pace

Running a startup forces founders and employees to learn more than they would at any traditional job, earlier in their career. Everyone is forced to do more, do it more quickly and are asked to execute beyond their pay grade and experience. This means rapid development of experience and skills that may take years to acquire in another environment. If the company doesn’t go big, at the least employees will walk away with knowledge and experience that makes them more valuable in the job market.

Long-term gain #4: Building a solid network

When building a startup, founders and employees meet and have the opportunity to develop relationships with key people who may influence the business or their career. They’ll attend industry events and meet business influencers, investors, founders and others who could get their ideas in front of the right eyes to help the startup take off. These connections may also support their individual careers down the road. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to be well-connected to a pool of successful investors when another great idea for a business manifests in the future.

While there can be downsides to founding or working at a startup in the beginning, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel — in the upside or downside. Ultimately, the experience gained, the connections made and lessons learned are likely to be more than enough value to cover any short-term losses.

And those who make it? They get to change the world in some way, experience a life-changing sense of accomplishment and validate that the risk was worth it all along.

What short-term sacrifices did you make when you started your own business? What did you gain long-term? Please comment below.

Related: 7 Essentials for Overcoming Mental Barriers to Exceptional Success