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Useful Tools for Building Your Website

This page is a collection of themes, plugins, and resources for author websites which I found useful and plan to use again. It has been sorted into categories for your convenience.

Social Media

 

  • AddtoAny – my current preferred social media plugin.
  • Social Warfare – a social media plugin that lets you share network specific images and snippets.
  • Buffer – an online service for managing multiple social media accounts.
  • IFTTT – I use this service to get notifications of any time I am mentioned on Twitter.
  • Zapier – A great alternative to IFTTT.

Mailing Lists

 

  • SendFox – an email newsletter service. It’s free tier can’t be beat.
  • Mailmunch – a second newsletter service. I like it for its form and for the subscription confirmation email option (you can use it to give away bonus content).
  • My blog posts – I’ve been blogging about this topic for a while now.

SEO

 

  • Yoast SEO – a good basic SEO plugin.
  • WP SEO Structured Data Schema – an advanced SEO plugin which helps make your content show up in google’s preferred formatting in its search results.
  • WP Keyword Suggest – this plugin helps you find longer keywords for posts.
  • Google Search Console – This tool will tell you how many people are finding your site through Google, and the terms they are searching for.

Setup

 

  • PeoplesHost – My recommended hosting company.
  • NameCheap – For registering your website domain.
  • ManageWP – This is a great online tool that lets you manage multiple WP websites from one place.
  • WP All in One Security – My go-to security plugin.
  • Divi – A versatile WP theme.

Images

 

  • DepositPhoto – My preferred source for licensed images
  • Flickr – A great source of free and legal images.
  • Where to find free and legal images (blog post)
  • PicResize – My goto tool for shrinking an image to fit in a small space.
  • Remove.bg – This tool removes the background from your photos.
  • Convert a Color – There are 4 different systems for define a color. This  site helps you convert from one system to another.
  • CMYK 2 RGB – This site makes it easy to convert colors from CMYK (used for print) and RGB (used on the web).
  • Canva – A great free online alternative to Photoshop.
  • CloudConvert – I mainly use this site to convert WEBP images to JPG, but it is agreat general purpose format conversion tool.

Blogging

 

Speed & Optimization

 

  • WP Smush – an image optimization plugin.
  • Shortpixel – an even better image optimization plugin (use this one).
  • WP-Optimize – a database optimization plugin.
  • GTMetrix.com – this is my main diagnostic tool for speeding up a site.
  • AMP – the official plugin for Google AMP.
  • AMP for WP – this plugin adds all the features you expected from the official plugin, including comment sections, menu, site logo, etc.
  • FV Gravatar Cache – this plugin caches gravatar icons
  • WP Fastest Cache – My preferred caching plugin.
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