This tool didn’t come from a brilliant idea scribbled on a whiteboard but from a very familiar request to “improve page performance.”
On paper, that sounds straightforward. In practice, it set off a long chain of conversations filled with acronyms, dashboards, and well-meaning suggestions.
Someone flagged LCP. Someone else pointed to CLS. Accessibility issues surfaced mid-discussion. SEO concerns followed shortly after 🫠
Each fix made sense on its own, but often improved one metric while quietly hurting another.
What made it harder was that not everyone in the room spoke the same language.
Developers were asked to implement performance and accessibility fixes they didn’t specialize in.
SEO specialists understood why metrics mattered, but didn’t always know how to trace them back to implementation.
Marketing and managers just wanted a clear answer to a simple question: Is the site actually getting better?
Then there were the tools. PageSpeed Insights is powerful, but intimidating. It consists of dense reports, long explanations, and scores that feel disconnected from the actual page.
Most of the time, fixes became educated guesses simply because no one could easily pinpoint the real culprit.
That’s where the slow loop sets in: change → run a report → wait → scroll → interpret → debate → repeat.
SEO & Accessibility Helper was built to shorten that loop. It’s a free Chrome extension that brings SEO, accessibility, and performance signals into one place.
Its goal is to bring all those signals together in a way that’s readable, visual, and grounded in the page you’re actually looking at.
It doesn’t aim to replace expert tools. It’s to make them usable by the entire team.
Note 🔍
SEO & Accessibility Helper was built with the intent to consolidate web audit workflows into a single Side Panel interface, allowing users to inspect DOM elements (headings, links, images), validate meta tags, and track Core Web Vitals via the PageSpeed Insights API without leaving the active tab. The current version in an MVP with potential to integrate new features and refine existing based on user feedback!
How to Get Started With One-Click Installation
One quiet problem with many SEO and performance tools is that they assume you’re already comfortable getting started. But if you’re not living in that world daily, the friction adds up fast.
This extension intentionally avoids that.
Installation is simple:
- Go to the Chrome Web Store listing
- Click on Add to Chrome
No build step. No setup wizard. You click the icon, and the analysis runs against the page you’re already on.
If you want live performance data, you can optionally add a Google PageSpeed Insights API key or upload a PageSpeed Insights report acquired in some other way. This unlocks real-time mobile and desktop audits directly inside the extension.
Tip 👇
Did you know you can PageSpeed Insights directly from browser dev tools? Simply download the generated report for your device selection as either JSON or HTML and upload on the extension’s Perfromance tab.
What’s normally a long, overwhelming report becomes a set of parsed, categorized insights you can actually talk about with other people.
Why this matters:
- Less tooling friction means faster alignment
- Insights become shared instead of siloed
- Conversations move from opinions to evidence
When performance and SEO data are easy to access, teams stop guessing and start collaborating.
Explore: This Is How To Love Writing Git Commits, Meet Gac
How to Get On-Page SEO Mastery (Without the Guesswork)
On-page SEO issues rarely announce themselves loudly. Usually, they quietly stack up.
Maybe you’re seeing rankings plateau, or social shares look off, or structure feels “not quite right,” but no one can easily explain why.
Visibility changes that.
SEO & Accessibility Helper surfaces core on-page SEO signals in a way that’s easy to scan and easy to explain.
Heading Structure
Headings are visualized from H1 through H6, making skipped levels or missing H1s immediately obvious.
You don’t need SEO theory to understand the problem. Imagine reading a document where chapters jump from 1 to 3. Search engines and screen readers feel that same confusion 💁♀️
Incorrect heading structure is part of semantic HTML and, I’d argue, one of the most prevalent and easy to mess up SEO features.
In fact, I caught one of my own mix-ups with headings while building the extension 🥲
Social Metadata
Open Graph and Twitter Card tags are validated upfront. When you share a page, you know exactly how it will appear.
No more discovering broken previews in the middle of posting that impactful LinkedIn post, or when users try to share your content, but it just looks “wonky.”
Tip 😯
Did you know that while favicons are typically fine as svg,og:imageandtwitter:imagemust be in PNG or JPG format because social media platforms prioritize universal compatibility and efficient?
Canonicals & Robots Directives
The extension helps surface these plainly, without digging through source code. You can confirm whether search engines are indexing the page you actually intended.
It’s, honestly, a small check that prevents big downstream issues.
The real value here isn’t perfection, it’s confidence. With visible SEO signals, there are fewer blind fixes and more conversations grounded in shared understanding.
Why Claiming Structured Data “Is There” Isn’t Enough
Structured data is notorious for failing quietly 🫠
A schema can exist on a page and still not work. Rich results don’t appear. Search Console stays silent. Everyone assumes it’s fine until it isn’t.
The extension visualizes JSON-LD schema in a collapsible tree view that mirrors the data structure.
Instead of parsing raw JSON, you can scan relationships, spot missing fields, and understand nesting issues at a glance.
I integrated JSON-LD schema for an enterprise blog that was relatively complex with many nested relationships a while back, and I can’t help thinking how much this capability would’ve been welcome.
Visibility in JSON-LD schema structure is especially useful across roles. SEO specialists know what schema should exist. Developers know how it was added. This tool bridges that gap by making the data readable for both.
No assumptions. No “Google will figure it out.” Just clarity.
How to Tackle Accessibility by Making the Invisible Visible
Accessibility issues often show up as a list of tasks handed off with little context. Picture contrast failures, missing alt text, or skipped headings.
The fixes are labeled “easy,” but the impact is rarely explained 🤨
What makes accessibility tricky is that it doesn’t always break the page for everyone.
SEO & Accessibility Helper ties accessibility issues directly to the elements causing them:
- Missing or empty alt attributes show alongside the images
- Color contrast is calculated against WCAG standards in real time
- Non-semantic interactive elements are flagged where they appear
Once these issues are visible, the conversation shifts. Designers understand why color choices matter. Developers know exactly what to fix. Managers get a clearer view of risk and progress.
Accessibility stops being abstract and starts being actionable.
How to Take Performance From Scores to Trends
Performance is so darn difficult to nail down since any progress should really be based on patterns.
Hot take? Maybe. But performance rarely fails all at once—it drifts.
When a feature ships, a metric might tick up slightly while another improves. Without history, it’s hard to tell whether things are actually getting better.
The extension integrates with Google PageSpeed Insights to run live audits and save results over time. LCP, FCP, and CLS become trends instead of isolated scores.
Tip 💡
You can opt to run a dynamic Google PageSpeed Insights report or manually upload your own (for those who see API and run the opposite direction). But, if you choose to use the API, the directions point you on the exact page to get your own (relatively simple process).
This makes performance conversations calmer and more grounded. Instead of debating feelings, teams can see when things changed and what likely caused it.
How Visual Highlighting Helps Turn Insight Into Action
Click an issue, the page scrolls, and the element highlights.
It’s as simple as that, but it changes everything.
Highlighting closes the gap between knowing there’s a problem and knowing where to fix it. It speeds up debugging, clarifies communication, and reduces friction across roles.
Take it from someone whose job is to resolve issues—don’t take visual cues for granted when troubleshooting.
With active highlighting as a visual cue, audits stop being reports and start becoming actions.
An Extension Built for How Teams Actually Work
SEO, accessibility, and performance don’t live in silos. They overlap, compete, and evolve as sites grow.
Most teams struggle due to fragmented visibility and intimidating tools, not because they don’t care.
It’s always easy to stash SEO and accessibility improvement, along with the larger scope of site performance fixes, into a long list of tech debt projects.
SEO & Accessibility Helper is an attempt to fix that.
It’s free. It’s approachable. It’s an MVP designed to grow based on real user intent and feedback.
And most importantly, it’s built for how teams actually work, not how tools assume they do.
If it shortens the loop even a little—fewer blind fixes, clearer conversations, better decisions—then it’s doing its job!
Try it out and let me know your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions in the comments below.
‘Till the next one ✌️
