Top Firefox SEO Extensions & Add-Ons

Chances are that you are using right now a Chrome web browser to watch this, right? Like most of the world is using right now Google Chrome as a web browser. They have 62% of the market share. I remember many, many, many years ago that I was using Firefox, right? And I don't know at what point, which, at which point I started using Chrome. And as far as I remember, I think it was because of Chrome DevTools. There were so many different functionalities and I was using still a lot of, many of these functionalities to double-check things as an SEO, right? Releases, changes on my client sites and my own sites. In any case, Realistically, although I love Chrome functionalities and all these extensions that exist nowadays, I started to see that my computer, I have a little laptop that I bring with me all the time, I work a lot on the go, right? Like, oh my God, RAM consumption was crazy, right? And I didn't want it to, of course I can upgrade, et cetera, but honestly, it's not reasonable that a web browser consumes so much RAM, right? So I wanted to give Firefox a chance again, uh, to avoid this from happening. And, and funnily enough, there are so many memes about this, right? Like RAM consumption from, from, from Chrome versus any other browsers. Um, and I thought that it actually— that it was going to be pretty hard to leave Chrome, right? I was so used to it. Um, realistically, it hasn't been that hard. I, I have been using already Firefox parallelly with Chrome, and right now I'm completely focused using Firefox nowadays because I found that many of these functionalities that I thought that they were Chrome only, completely findable only in Chrome, are also in Firefox. Firefox also has its own DevTools, developer tools. There's so many of this. SEO extensions that I was using in Chrome that I was also able to find them on Firefox or alternatives that will work pretty well also in Firefox. So in today's episode, I want to show you which are those Firefox extensions that you can use to make the switch to if you want to, if you want to give your computer a little bit more free free RAM. Let's take a look. Let's start with a Firefox add-on that you are probably using already as a Chrome extension, the Link Redirect Trace extension here as an add-on that you can also use in Firefox. There is a Firefox version here from Link Research Tool. It's pretty, pretty handy because you can see the HTTP status of any page. So for example, here I was checking before if the HTTP version of the homepage in Remoters is Effectively, 301 redirecting towards the HTTPS version of the URL. And we can see here the raw HTTP headers information. We can see here the speed. We can see here the amount of backlinks. We can also see if any page somehow is being blocked through the robots.txt. For example, this page here, the speed version of Neta Porter here in the subdirectory is shown to be blocked to the robots.txt and it is blocked indeed. If we go to the robots.txt, we can see here how it has been blocked probably because it's not even in Spanish, still the same content in English just like that, right? So they're probably blocking it because of that. And we can see this and we can do this very straightforward validation also of the canonicalization of the page. Directly through this little add-on that is very, very handy. Probably one of those first add-ons that you want to install. Another very handy extension that we have also as a Firefox add-on is SEO Medium here. Probably you have also already used it in Chrome, and if you haven't, you're really missing out because this is another one very handy SEO Honestly, it has the option to analyze the homepage SEO configuration. So for example, here I have title, meta descriptions, the canonicalization, the meta robots, the headings, the images, those without an alt description, the Open Graph configuration, the Twitter cards configuration of any given page that you're seeing. I can highlight all the external and internal links of a given page. I can check for broken links. Or links going to redirected pages from this page. I can have a SERP preview. I can see how this page will look for a specific query. So for example here, remote work resources, I can check here, oh, this is how this page will look if it ranked for this specific query. Or I can actually check and compare any SERP, international SERP, right? So for example, I want to see see the SERP for the US and for the UK in English for remote work resources here and see if the same pages are being ranked or not, right? And how do they compare? And if my site is ranked specifically in the same way or not in both, right? So I can check here for the UK and do the same for the US. And for example, in this case I can see here, In this other case, I can see that removers is a little bit higher in the SERPs for the UK. So it's pretty handy, it's an all-in-one if you haven't used it yet. Only this extension will cover a lot and will allow you to do many, many of the validations that you are probably already doing in Chrome. And if you are not yet using it, you probably are using many different extensions just for the same functionality that this one extension can give you. If you don't want to completely rely on SEO Minion and want to use another all-in-one SEO extension, SEO add-on, take a look at the SEO Info one from Web— Webull— Webull? How do you pronounce this? Webuller Press. This is another very handy, again, tool, all-in-one. You can see here that it will show you the HTTP status, if it is indexable, if it is followable, if it is mobile-friendly. And it will show you the loading times here, title tag, canonicalization, robots.txt, the description, um, the HTTP status, if it is indexable, followable, mobile, if it has AMP or not, um, more details regarding the, the performance, uh, more details regarding the, the res— response headers here, the IP address here, the hreflang configuration in case it has or not, Open Graph, Twitter cards, etc., etc. So it's actually very, very handy. It's even more complete, I will say, has additional homepage configuration information, although not necessarily the simulation areas and SERP previews that the SEO Minion has. So I think that they can complement each other very well. And here even more information. So I will say that this is another very handy tool for you to check the on-page SEO configuration of any page. And there are even many options to choose from. Here's another SEO tool, All-in-One Validator, that has also an extension for Firefox. Not only for Chrome, Mangools SEO extension. So for example, with Mangools we can check many, many, many things, not only on-page SEO configuration. So for example, we can take a look at the most important backlinks of any given site, as we can see here, including those links not only to specific page but to any internal page of of the domain. It analyzes the root domain. We can take a look at the on-page SEO of the specific URL that we are seeing here, uh, title tag, description, number of, number of words, uh, the robots.txt configuration. It looks for the sitemap, if it is, um, how many pages, uh, the, the, the site has, uh, indexed in, in Google, the canonical configuration the headings here, most common keywords on the page. So for example, 2 words or 3 words terms here, the outbound links of the page, where do they go, where they are found, what is the anchor text, PageSpeed too, it validates the social tags too. So as you can see, we have many different alternatives, many different options, If you actually use Mangools tools and you pay for it, it also has this run tracking option here directly, but if not, even if you are not a client, if you are not using them and you are not a client, you can still get pretty cool, useful, meaningful information here and even the page speed validation here directly with recommendations of things that can be done to improve speed. So as you can see, it's pretty handy and yet another option not only to double validate and double check what the other tools have given to us, but also to expand a little bit with additional information. PreXML is one of those add-ons that I used to have also in Chrome, and I loved it because, well, I didn't use it necessarily every day, but whenever I needed to check an XML sitemap directly in my browser, it was so, so handy. So for example, here I want to go and take a look at this XML sitemap from Nike here. And as you can see, instead of being shown the XML sitemap index in a very ugly, non-desirable format display in my browser, we can take a look at it like this. We can actually search by name or XPath too. And if, for example, if I click here, I am able to go through and to start browsing through the different XML sitemaps too. And I am going to be shown here if we wait for a little bit, and we are going to be able to see all of the different URLs of this XML sitemap that actually is including and featuring hreflang annotations too. So it'll support them as you can see here. Let's take a look. So it's not necessarily like very straightforward XML sitemap, but even Even like that, it does a pretty good job on displaying and showing the different organization and really facilitates that we can go through and start browsing through any given sitemap directly in the browser without having to open it in a code editor in our computer or having to download it directly. Disable JavaScript is one of those Firefox add-ons that you should definitely install for quick technical SEO validations. And as the name says, what it simply does is to enable and disable JavaScript from any given tab. So for example, here I am in the Starbucks app that is a web app that is relying on client-side rendering, relying a lot on JavaScript to display the So of course, if I disable JavaScript, it doesn't show anything. But for example, if I go here to the Remoters homepage, it is not really using that much JavaScript to show any of the content. So if I disable JavaScript here, you can see— oh, I can see everything on the page. So if I go back here to the Starbucks app, if I disable— if I enable JavaScript, JavaScript now here on this tab, I will be able to see again here all of the content. So it's pretty handy to validate and check quickly if you're using or if you're relying on JavaScript a lot, if you're using client-side rendering or server-side rendering in case you're using JavaScript to show any of your content. Something else to love about Firefox is that It also has built-in functionalities that are pretty, pretty cool. So for example, you can use extensions or add-ons to take screenshots. So for example, the Awesome Screenshot Plus extension is available for Firefox. However, Firefox has this built-in functionality of taking screenshots. You just need to right-click in whatever place and you will be able to take a screenshot like this of specific areas of the screen or of the whole page that you are looking at, right? It also has a very similar functionality than the one that we have with Chrome DevTools that we all love. And if I remember well, that was one of the main reasons why I switched a long time ago, right? So in this case, we also have developer tools in Firefox. Similar to Chrome DevTools, with Firefox Developer Tools, we have a panel here, different panels that we can go through the DOM of the page that we are browsing and take a look at the code here. We can search through the HTML. We have the console. We have a debugger. We can see the performance of any given page and we can record it. We can see the different network calls. We can switch between, again, devices. We can simulate devices, any given specific device here. So that is very, very, very cool too. So many of these very popular functionalities that we had gotten very used with Chrome DevTools, we also have them available here. There are additional functionalities or extensions that we can integrate, for example, a web scraper or this page performance add-on that can be included here in the developer tools console. So it's— I'm sure that there will be a few little functionalities that won't be designed exactly the same, right? And we have seen that Chrome has invested so much lately on including many, many, many different functionalities and validation in Chrome DevTools. But I'm pretty sure that most of the main functionalities, validations, at least the ones that I use to go through the DOM, to switch between the different type of devices, to take a look a little bit of the performance of a page. Of course, I miss a little bit on having the Lighthouse integration that I had in Chrome. We have this little web performance additional functionality. It's definitely not the same, not as good looking, nice looking, right? So I will say, but of course, like we have these other extensions that I showed you before that included performance validations like the one of Mongoose, for example, included performance validation. So as you can see, there are some things that are the same or very similar or very good alternatives and then at the end of the day, I think that we are able to do 99% of the things that we used to do with Chrome DevTools also with not only the developer tools of Firefox, but with the additional extensions that we can use. So at the end of the day, it's a pretty good balance. It's a pretty good result. And last but not least, let's take a look a little bit at a few add-ons that are available for Firefox that are not necessarily only SEO-focused, but they can be pretty handy for SEO validation. Like for example, the Web Developer extension here, um, to manage cookies, CSS, forms, images, etc. That can be very helpful for troubleshooting. Also the Web Scraper add-on that is also available for Firefox. The Google Analytics Debug add-on here. The Ghostery add-on also for ads for identifying, blocking ad trackers, etc. The Built With extension here to identify what is the technology that is used for any given page that you're visiting. The Web Developer Checklist, also the Cookie Manager. So you can see there's a wealth of add-ons, of extensions for Firefox that are very similar. They're always an alternative for one Pretty much. I'm pretty sure that for one that you're already using for Chrome. So if you want to try it out, if you want to do the switch, if you want to check if you can free a lot of your RAM, a lot of your memory by doing this switch, give it a go. And I'm pretty sure that you will find that 99% of the functionality that you were getting from Chrome, you will still find it here in Firefox while gaining all these I hope that this has been useful for you. Let me know if you try it out, how it goes. If you know of any other extension, any other add-on too, please let me know in the comments. I'll be happy to share also over Twitter. And if you have also any idea for future Crawling Mondays, let me know. I'll be happy to do and cover whatever topic you think that might be useful too. So thank you very much. Thank you. And see you next Monday. Bye bye. Chronic Mondays.