As we are aware in today’s website designs it was never enough to just design a beautiful website. It must have a clean code, undoubtedly, be free of security leaks and of course to also load quickly thus being as convenient as possible for visitors to use. That’s a lot of demands – and not all. As a website operator, it becomes increasingly difficult to survey all important factors and above all, to optimize them in the right places.

Microsoft wants to support website operators and has published 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 of similar tools – and makes a lot of difference. 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. Secondly, Sonar not only statically rates a website’s code, as many other tools do, but also executes it. We are aware it doesn’t sounds very spectacular at first, but it makes a difference in the end result.

You can also use sonar among 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 later. Of course we tried that and it worked flawlessly. The tool is very accurate and reveals many (small) bugs that can be fixed. Since the tool was initially only available as a browser version for Chrome and Edge, it is now also easy to use with other browsers. Over time, the tool itself will grow and become an important helper to anyone building or running websites.