Hexometer.com was born on January 17, 2019, which means it is already more than a year that we are making the web better!
In the early days of 2019, we had a goal to define and implement the most essential website analyzing tools and give it for free because we think that the general ideology of the web is an open collaboration and every website owner should have access to tools which are necessary to make a better website. This ended up being truly an amazing experience, because after about the half-year of implementations and optimizations we got the powerful toolset available online, which rewarded us by real usage numbers below!
Having a free tool for scanning a website is awesome, but after a few months of active public usage, we started to get a customer requests to analyze their websites periodically because they are unable physically to scan it every single day. That simple idea shaped Hexometer how you see it now.
We know what’s wrong with your website
There are a lot of monitoring tools for getting notifications when your server is not available, but if you remember how many times you actually noticed that some of your pages are not working properly, or your SSL certificate expired, or you changed your hosting provider lost your canonical redirection configuration, etc… This also comes from our personal experience, when we had working website fully tested, over time some pages started to brake because of the content updates, or somehow we didn’t remember to renew our domain name on time. Luckily now Hexometer will notify you when there is something going on your website, and it is not only a technical website uptime monitoring, but it is content-based monitoring with over 2800 data points that we track for each website. We released this feature on November 1, 2019, and right after a week from the initial release, we got more than 500 websites under our monitoring tool, which gave us a lot more inspiring ideas to achieve our initial goal of making the web way better place than it is now.
The first thing that we implemented in a very short period of time is a feature called Tasks, which tells exactly what you have to do in order to fix your website problem. The idea of having exact fixes was so fascinating for us that we implemented it within a week and that was the start of our main direction for the coming year!
Fixing your website problems for you
Hexometer.com started as a website analyzing tool for manual usage, but every time when we’ve been looking at our tools usage data, we clearly have been identifying the same pattern of errors that could be fixed automatically. Obviously, for fixing websites outside of our environment, we had to get permission and access to website hosting or platform in a way of a plugin/add-on. So the first step was to make a generic Tasks for people who wanted to repair their website on their own. For example, if you haven’t verified your domain name with Facebook or you forgot to remove Google+ dead link from your website we have a task for you explaining what to do, with an exact easy-to-use guide. And this kind of process follows every type of issue that we are encountering on your website. This sets us on top of every other website analyzer because we are giving you an easy-to-use to-do list of tasks and guide you through the process of fixing them.
We’ve been surprised, but after reviewing scanned websites data, it turns out that WordPress based blogs had way more broken links than all of the other website platforms. And when we started to look into it, we found that it is because WordPress mostly popular for Blogs and blogging involves also putting an external links to resources, which over time could stop working or change their URLs, but the blog has that content already indexed and it is potentially increasing bounce rate. Helping to solve this issue was our next and final goal for the end of 2019!
In December 2019 we launched our Automatic Broken Link repair plugin for WordPress! It makes sure that 404 links in your content will not be shown to search engine (google, bing, etc.) crawlers and your visitors, but the link anchor text and the overall website design will remain the same. This powerful feature is already helping many WordPress based websites to increase their visitor satisfaction and keep their content broken links free. Officially we setup our path to make more features for automatically fixing/repairing website errors.
Conclusion
2019 was the year of founding, shaping and growing Hexometer. We got a product of the day, week and month on ProductHunt which helped us to understand how important it is for us to make a website browsing experience better. For 2020 Hexometer still will keep its promise of improving the web and helping to keep business owners focus on their business, not the website issues.