Recommended Tools
The real power of WordPress development is the ability to add plugins, which provide add-on functionality to your site and allow you to do more without needing to pay out the ear for a custom program development. We have a different philosophy about plugins than most internet marketers do. we do not allow ourselves to have more than about 10 plugins on any WordPress site we run. Why? Not all plugins are well-coded. The more plugins your site has, the more likely it is to run into problems down the road if the plugins aren’t updated, conflict with other plugins or themes, etc.
We have spent many, many days trying to fix our site’s or troubleshoot bugs because we simply had too many WordPress plugins.
Having said that, here are the plugins/tools that we use on our WordPress Sites.
Our recommended tools we use
Monetization Ads
Adthrive has been fantastic to work with. Every communication I’ve ever had with them has been a pleasant experience, their RPMs (Revenue per thousand impressions) are unmatched in the industry, and they do a LOT of work to roll out the red carpet for their publishers and make sure you are happy with them
Image plugins
Short Pixel. We spent many years resizing images in Photoshop and messing with compression settings to get the smallest-size images on our sites, and then we tried ShortPixel to save time. Not only was ShortPixel a huge time saver, but it also made the images about 40% smaller than what we could do in Photoshop with the same visual image quality.
W3 Total Cache
This site speeds up WordPress. Basically, it caches (takes a snapshot of) common elements in your site and serves them up to users much faster when subsequent users try to load the same content. If you have no idea what all of that means, just install the plugin and use the default configuration. Trust me–your site will load faster.
UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup
This is not optional–you must backup your WordPress. I highly recommend the Updraft plugin. It has a ton of features and there is a free version that has the basic functionality you need. I recommend backing up your WordPress at least twice a week.
WordPress Themes
Divi is the best overall theme I’ve ever used. The page builder on Divi is second to none. It’s really well done and makes everything look like a better web design. WanderCIRCLE uses Divi.
Email List Provider
Send In Blue. The vast majority of successful eCommerce are paying VERY high prices for services like Drip, Aweber, etc. SendInBlue has a POWERFUL feature set just like the big
We love that they have a full-featured marketing tool so you can set up different parts of the campaign to go out based on the customer’s previous actions. We also love that they charge per email sent instead of just how many people you have on your list. Since we don’t send out mass emails all the freaking time, we get much better pricing here.
Seriously, before paying for one of the more expensive services, ask yourself what feature they have that SendInBlue doesn’t. For us, there wasn’t a single feature we’d use that another company has that SendInBlue doesn’t.
WooCommerce Shopping Cart
There are many good shopping carts on the market, but the one we use is open source, constantly updated and has a whole suite of plugins available to customize for your site. It is the WooCommerce Plugin and we love it. We’ve tried many of the paid shopping carts and none of them has the features and solid code base that WooCommerce does. We do tens of thousands of business through this plugin every month and have never once had it fail us.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
We exclusively use the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin. It has some advanced features that serious Internet Marketers need and is becoming the standard for WordPress SEO.
Prefered tools we use