I spent months building 86 free online tools. Here is what I learned aboutbuilding a tools website from scratch.
I have been building TrendPro (trendproservices.co.uk) for the past several
months. It now has 86+ free browser-based tools across 12 categories.
Here is what I have learned that nobody told me upfront:
1. Nobody cares about the first 20 tools
Traffic did not start moving until the site had 50+ tools. Tools websites are
a long game — you are building a corpus of pages, not launching a single
product. Each tool page is a potential entry point from Google. The more
tools, the more pages, the more chances to rank.
2. The hardest tools are the ones that should be easiest
Image compression and PDF merging are the most searched-for tools in the
niche. They are also the most technically complex. Getting image compression
to run in the browser without a server was three weeks of work. It was worth
it — "no upload required" is a genuine differentiator.
3. Competing with SmallSEOTools and TinyWow head-to-head is the wrong strategy
These sites have years of backlink authority. The right move is to be better
at the thing they are getting worse at — their UX is deteriorating (ads,
paywalls, slow loading) while TrendPro is getting faster and cleaner.
4. Blog content is more important than I expected
A single blog post targeting "tinywow alternative" or "free tools for
students" drives 10x more qualified traffic than any social media post.
The blog is the most underrated part of a tools website.
Current stack: Next.js + TypeScript + Tailwind + Vercel. AI tools via Groq.
PDF tools via ILovePDF and CloudConvert APIs. Image tools all browser-based.
Happy to answer questions about the technical build or the SEO strategy.
