Today, it is no longer enough to design a beautiful website. It must have a clean code, be free of security leaks and of course must also be able to load quickly, thus making it as convenient as possible for visitors to use. That’s a lot of demands – and not all. As a website owner, it becomes increasingly difficult to survey all important factors and above all to optimize them in the right places.

Microsoft now wants to support website operators and has recently released the tool Sonar. This open source software is intended to help uncover optimization potential and thus contribute to better performance and security of websites. This puts Microsoft in the long line of manufacturers with similar tools – which are made a lot different. On the one hand, the foundations have been laid by the open source approach and the handover to the JS Foundation that the community can further develop or expand Sonar. Second, Sonar not only statically rates a website’s code, as many other tools do, but also executes it. Sounds not very spectacular at first, but makes a difference in the end result.

You can use sonar amongst other things in the browser version. In our test, however, it was not immediately possible to obtain results. After entering the URL, however, we were provided with a permalink under which we can retrieve the results sometime later. So we are still curious what Sonar reveals everything to us. Incidentally, the tool is currently available as a browser version only for Chrome and Edge. However, it is planned to soon offer accessibility for other browsers. The tool itself should also grow and thus become an important helper for anyone who builds or operates websites.