Usability, simply defined, is the measure of how easily used your website is. If people can 
access your site, your links, and all of your pages to find the information that they need with ease, then you likely have good website usability. If you have complaints of difficulties or accessibility issues, then your usability is likely not that great. Before you can convince people to come to your site, use your site, and complete a sale or conversion, you have to make sure that it’s easy for them to do so. Otherwise, they’ll just go somewhere else.
You might be picturing the expensive costs of website testing, but it doesn’t have to be something that you spend a lot of money on. There are many tools that you can use to test your website, including specific functions that are low- or no-cost solutions.
Chalkmark starts at $98 for 30 days, and allows websites to test specific actions of their website and how users find the tools and navigations useful, or whether things are too complicated. You can send a survey invitation to any users that you choose, and receive results in a PDF file that includes the length of tests and which parts are most difficult.
Google has a website optimizer that performs split testing for free. This basically means that you can test two versions of a website to see which one is more user-friendly than the other. By doing this, you may be able to get a better feel for the best option for usability.
Simple Mouse Tracking is a free tool that allows you to monitor user movements and clicks on the site page. In order to use this tool, you need PHP to be run on your host server and a small part of JavaScript for the pages.
ClickTale monitors clicks, keystrokes, scrolling, and heat maps of where cursors linger on the page. This free plan gives up to 400 page views a month, and there are paid plans starting at $99 with enhanced features and more page views.
Five Second Test is a test that gives survey takers five seconds to respond to questions about the elements, the most liked parts of the site, and which of two pages a user prefers.
As you can see, you don’t have to spend a lot to get some insight on your own website usability. It’s actually quite simple for you to use these tools and others to gain information about how your site works and how well it works for all users.
