Inside the Brightspot Toolkit browser extension and why it was built

Most people who work in a CMS spend more time on the front end than they realize. They check how a story looks in a browser, verify headlines, spot typos and chase down performance issues. And then they switch to the back end to actually fix things.

That back-and-forth is friction. Small but constant, and easy to overlook because everyone has learned to live with it.

“A lot of users spend a lot of time on the front end,” says Vicki Tran, a Product Manager at Brightspot. “That context switching from the front end to the back end takes time, especially when they’re trying to edit a component on a page in the CMS.”

Historically, Brightspot users have utilized a simple tool — a bookmarklet — to jump into the CMS. One customer built a custom extension for their users. “More than one person created a bookmarklet,” says Paul Petty, a Principal Engineer at Brightspot. “It was very simple and did one thing. It took the content ID and opened the CMS with that ID.”

When Brightspot hosted a hackathon in late 2024, the event generated a surge of ideas, including ways to improve the “click-to-edit” tool. Shortly after, Basima Zafar, showed a colleague a proof of concept that went well beyond click-to-edit, drawing on her experience as a platform engineer at Brightspot.

“I was doing all the models, all the SEO requirements,” Zafar remembers. “From that knowledge, I just knew what people were actually using.”

That knowledge shaped the early feature set. SEO analysis was an obvious addition. So was generative engine optimization, or GEO, which evaluates how content appears to large language models. Accessibility auditing came next, and for Zafar, that one was personal.

Digital trends

The Brightspot approach to web accessibility

Brightspot integrates accessibility throughout its CMS platform and delivery processes. The focus spans design, development, content creation and QA, ensuring inclusive digital experiences from the ground up.

When the team was deciding what to build into the Brightspot Toolkit, accessibility wasn’t just a checklist item.

“My mom is visually impaired,” Zafar notes, “so I care a lot about making sites as accessible as possible.”

She described a session to her colleagues where her mother walked through a website in real time. The session revealed how much small oversights like missing or vague alt text, poor contrast and unclear heading structure matter to users who depend on assistive technology.

“It should be like ‘man in blue shirt holding a white cup’,” Zafar says, describing what good alt text looks like. “Not just ‘man holding a cup’.”

For the Brightspot team, the goal wasn’t just to surface accessibility issues. It was to put the fix within reach of the person who could actually make it.

“Historically, you have to either ask somebody to run an accessibility check or file a ticket,” Tran remarks. “A lot of the fixes are very doable by the editor. But just being able to run the audit can be complicated.”

The Toolkit’s built-in WCAG 2.1 AA auditing changes that. Editors can run a check on any live page, see what’s failing and address it directly, without routing the request through a developer.

Petty frames it as a signal about what Brightspot values. “We’re thinking about accessibility just as much as we are about page performance and SEO.”

There’s also a practical consistency benefit. Different teams and clients often use different accessibility tools, which means audits don’t always compare apples to apples. By building a single auditing standard into the extension, it establishes a baseline that can be applied to every project.

Designed to make content operations easier

See the Toolkit in action in this short video introducing the Brightspot Toolkit.

Watch the video

The Toolkit’s developer-focused features came from a similar process: listening.

“In the beginning, we just had internal meetings with different people within our organization,” Zafar says. “We met with people on our QA and customer success teams and asked them what tools they specifically use when someone comes to them about performance or accessibility issues.”

That’s how the extension ended up with raw JSON inspection, Google PageSpeed Insights integration and HAR file capture. Each feature traces back to a real workflow that someone was already doing the hard way.

The HAR file tool is a good example. Capturing a HAR file, the kind of network log that support teams use to diagnose hard-to-reproduce issues, used to require walking a client through a four-step process inside browser DevTools. The Toolkit does it in one click.

“You could trace that back to working on support desk tickets,” Petty says, “where people try to explain to a client how to get the HAR file.”

Quick links, another feature in the extension, came directly from customer feedback. The pattern held throughout development: talk to the people doing the work, then build what they actually need.

Watch how the Toolkit works

Watch this intro video about how the browser extension can be used to diagnose and troubleshoot your published web content.

Watch the video

The Brightspot Toolkit is now available in the Chrome Web Store, free for any Brightspot CMS user, with no developer configuration required. Its current feature set covers five core areas.

• Click-to-edit lets any user click an element on a live page and land directly in its edit form in Brightspot. No back-end navigation, no guesswork.
• SEO and GEO analysis provides real-time evaluation of title tags, meta descriptions and link health, including how content appears to large language models.
• Accessibility validation runs automated WCAG 2.1 AA audits covering alt text, contrast ratios and heading hierarchy.
• Developer tools expose structured content data and API responses without requiring a separate tab or application.
• Performance diagnostics, powered by Google PageSpeed Insights, surfaces Core Web Vitals data directly in the browser panel.

New capabilities are released on a schedule independent from Brightspot CMS version cycles. Users get them the moment they open their browser.

The team is working on features that further integrate the extension into AI-assisted workflows.

A recent update includes persona-based views, which lets users preview a page as different audience segments see it. Further out, the team is exploring an integration between the extension and Brightspot’s model context protocol (MCP) server, which would let users interact with CMS content through an AI interface directly from the front end.

Petty describes the long-term vision in practical terms. “If you see a small typo on the front page of your site, the steps to get from where that typo exists to publishing a fix and verifying it on the live page just seem like overkill,” he says. “If you could highlight the text and fix and publish in one fell swoop, that would be a big time saver.”

“The overall goal is to just make people more aware of issues and to fix issues right in front of you,” Zafar says. “We want editors to have more control over their content and to be able to push it quicker.”

Every tool your team needs, in one browser extension

The Brightspot Toolkit gives marketing, editorial and development teams a shared window into every page they publish. Click to edit content directly in Brightspot, audit SEO, validate accessibility and inspect raw content data — all from one panel.

Learn more about the Toolkit extension here