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
- 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.
