Useful Tools for Building Your Website
This page is a collection of themes, plugins, and resources for WordPress which I find useful and may want 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
- Cookie Law Info – an easy way to comply with EU’s law on tracking cookies.
- wpSpoiler – easy to use spoiler tags
- WP 404 Auto Redirect to Similar Post – Got a broken link on your site? This plugin automatically searches for pages and posts with a similar slug, and then redirects visitors to that page.
- WordPress Notification Bar – it’s like a banner ad across the top of your site.
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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