How To Test A Localhost Website With Any Free Online SEO Tool?

Last updated:

8 November 2023

Websites are in most cases, built on a local development machine, where the website is available on localhost. It is worth checking your website for SEO, Accessibility, and Usability before publishing changes to a website.

How to test a localhost website with online checkers?

You need a reverse proxy to run a SEO check for a website that runs on localhost.

A service that we can use for this is Ngrok. Ngrok runs as a command line utility on your machine and gives you a publicly available URL that sends traffic to your localhost server.

Install Ngrok: https://ngrok.com/download .

Once installed you can publish your website that runs e.g. on localhost:8080:

ngrok http 8080

Output:

ngrok                                                                                                                                                                    (Ctrl+C to quit)
      
Join us in the ngrok community @ https://ngrok.com/slack

Session Status                online
Session Expires               1 hour, 59 minutes
Terms of Service              https://ngrok.com/tos
Version                       3.1.0
Region                        Europe (eu)
Latency                       -
Web Interface                 http://127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding                    https://68e0-185-220-212-43.eu.ngrok.io -> http://localhost:8080

Connections                   ttl     opn     rt1     rt5     p50     p90
                            0       0       0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00

When you now visit the URL, in my case https://68e0-185-220-212-43.eu.ngrok.io, you'll be prompted to register and create a free account. Create your free account and verify your email. After completion, you will see a command with an authtoken. Copy the authtoken and run the command in your command line interface:

ngrok config add-authtoken <your-auth-token>

Start Ngrok again:

ngrok http 8080

When you visit the URL, you will see your localhost website. The website is now publicly available as long as Ngrok runs on your computer.

You can now enter the Ngrok URL in any website check tool. Go to our Free Accessibility Checker and try your website that runs on your development machine.