There is a huge choice of WordPress resources, and it isn’t easy to choose the best WordPress resources for your project if you are starting or looking to add a new feature to your website.
We have listed our favorite WordPress resources below to save you time. We hope that the following list of resources will help you improve your WordPress website.
WordPress Hosting
SiteGround, the largest web hosting platform, has started using Google Cloud platform to host part of its infrastructure. It claims to offer 99.99% uptime. SiteGround servers are available in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, and Netherlands with the optional response time.
You should go with the SiteGround option for your website if you need:
- Unlimited data transfer
- Free website transfer
- WP-CLI enabled
- Free SSL certificate
- Low pricing and supercacher technology
- Free website backup & migration
- SSD Hosting
- Free CMS Install and Email Accounts
- HTTP/2 enabled servers
- LXC-based Stability
SiteGround startup plan is good for bloggers or beginner users that have a single small-to-medium-sized website and need less than 10 GB of space, but if you have more then one website with around 20 GB of space then you should go with the SiteGround GrowBig plan. Being a advance user, having multiple websites with around 40 GB of space you need better-performing servers, then you should choose SiteGround GoGeek plan, this plan gives you access to pre-installed Git repositories also.
PRO TIP
If you are a beginner or have a small business setup then SiteGround is the best option for you because of its affordable packages, free encrypt SSL certificates, speedy loading, and security. You can also easily move your website.
Bluehost websites are powered by WordPress which allows you to customize and build your site with over 50,000 template choices from the WordPress.Org library. It provides you with a seamless WordPress integration facility with a super-competitive uptime guarantee of 99.98%.
You should go with the Bluehost option for your website, if you need:
- Unlimited Disk Storage and
- POP3/POP3 Secure or IMAP/Secure IMAP E-mail Support
- Free World-Wide CDN
- SSD Hardware
- Unlimited Add-on Domains, Parked Domains and Subdomains
- Free SSL Certificate
- FTP Access
- Web File Manager
- Secure Shell (SSH) Access and Hotlink Protection
- Unlimited Domain Hosting
The Blue Host Basic plan is good for bloggers or beginner users with having a single website and 50 GB of storage is enough for the project but if you have more then one website and the storage is unmetered then you should go with Blue Host Plus Plan, It also comes with unlimited email accounts.
Blue Host Choice Plus Plan has the same features as Plus Plan and in addition, you will be awarded free domain privacy and better backup options. If you are an advanced user and have multiple websites, then the Blue Host Pro tier Plan is suitable for having higher performances.
PRO TIP
Blue Host is probably not the best match for beginners, as their support is not the most helpful. Additionally, they won’t help with your site’s migration unless you pay extra.
If you own e-commerce, are a thriving blogger, or provide Software as a Service then you should look for alternatives because you need the best performance for that, and here Bluehost isn’t for you. Also, Bluehost won’t be for those looking for advanced hosting features like staging areas or Git repositories either.
Only WP Engine, the WordPress Digital Experience Platform, offers the managed WordPress hosting packages. Its uptime monitoring solution will check your website’s server at a regular frequency and alert you when your website goes offline for any reason.
You should go with the WP Engine option for your website if you need:
- Free fully managed global CDN
- WordPress core updates
- Git and SFTP connections
- Auto migration
- Automated backups
- SSH gateway
- Free traffic encryption with SSL certificates
- GeoTarget
- Data Center Redundancy with Uptime Protection
- Threat Detection & Blocking with Disaster Recovery
The WP Engine Startup plan is good for bloggers or beginner users that have a single website, need less than 10 GB of space, and get support for up to 25,000 visits per month.
WP Engine Growth Plan increases your traffic support to 100,000 and provides you with 10 sites. Its Scale Plan provides even more resources, bumps your site count up to 30, and supports up to 400,000 visits per month. Premium and Enterprise, a custom plan, provide lots of additional resources and support and move you’re hosting up from a shared setup to dedicated servers.
PRO TIP
If you are confident that your monthly visits won’t exceed the maximum amount and it’s a regular number then WP Engine is highly recommended for you because here Live support is important for you and you will get fast, reliable WordPress hosting. But if your visitor numbers fluctuate a lot monthly, then Skip WP Engine option.
Keyword Research
SEMrush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. It is a content marketing platform that provides a wide range of solutions for developing a successful website. SEMrush also helps you to identify valuable keywords for your website.
With a good keyword research, SEMrush also provides you:
- Brand monitoring
- Social media tracker
- Site audit
- Position tracking
- Backlinks and its audit tool
- Organic and Advertising research
- Audience and organic traffic insights
- Traffic analysis
- Content analyzer
- SEO writing assistant with OnPage SEO checker
SEMrush PRO Plan is best for freelancers, startups and in-house marketers with a limited budget. You can track 500 keywords and crawl 100,000 pages per month. For growing marketing agencies, SEMrush Guru Plan is an ideal option.
You can track 1500 keywords and crawl 300,000 pages per month. Its Business Plan is for advance users, E-commerce projects and businesses with an extensive web presence. With this plan, you can track 5,000 keywords and crawl 1,000,000 pages per month. Enterprise, a custom plan, helps to fit the marketing needs of your business.
SEMrush is not an ideal tool for beginners. It’s actually for the users who are serious about optimizing and growing their website and are willing to put in the work to do it.
PRO TIP
If your site is starting to see a little search traffic and you want to grow it significantly, then you should go with the SEMrush option. It is perfect for someone who is running or thinking about starting a freelance SEO business or small agency.
AHREFS, the best digital marketing analysis tool, used for preparing audit reports, keyword analysis, backlink analysis, URL rankings, competitive analysis, and many more. You can get the best keywords from AHREFS that you need to optimize for improving the website ranking.
With a competitor keyword analysis, AHREFS also provides you:
- SERP history report
- Backlink audits and analyze the internal backlinks
- Monitor outbound links
- Validate qualify and analyze competitors
- Track individual keywords
- Track total organic visibility
- Brand management
- Site audits
- Uncover content gaps and track ranking history
- Monitor backlink growth or decline over time
AHREFS Lite Plan is ideal for freelancers and beginner users. You can track 300 keywords and run 1 site audit per month. For SEO consultants and in-house marketers, AHREFS Standard Plan is a perfect plan.
You can track 1000 keywords and run 10 site audits per month with this plan. AHREFS Advanced Plan is good for experienced freelancers i-e: 3 users. With this plan, you can track 4000 keywords and run 25 site audits per month. AHREFS Agency Plan is ideal for advanced users and is designed for online marketing agencies i-e: more than 5 users. It offers the greatest access to Ahref’s dataset.
PRO TIP
AHREFS is the best tool for SEO and link building. If you are not a major corporation, then this tool is ideal for you. It should do well for small or mid-sized businesses, as long as they can afford its higher prices.
Choose this option wisely, because AHREFS didn’t offer any free trial and also has no integration with Google Analytics or search console.
MOZ, SEO software for smarter marketing, makes SEO, inbound marketing, link building, and content marketing easy. From MOZ keyword explorer, you can get the keyword information like its monthly search volume, SERP features, and its difficulty score. You can categorize, prioritize, and compare keywords and phrases to fine-tune your keyword and content strategy using MOZ.
With a comprehensive keyword analysis, MOZ also provides you:
- Rank tracking
- Content optimization
- Link building and research
- Site crawl and rank alerts
- Log file analysis
- Backlink monitoring
- SERP rank tracking
- Data visualization
- Custom report
- Competitor analysis
If you’re new to SEO or just need the basics then MOZ Standard Plan is ideal for you. You can track 150 keywords and can crawl 100,000 pages per month.
For growing marketing agencies, MOZ Medium Plan is the best option, You can get Ample limits plus full access to keyword research tools. With this plan, You can track 5000 keywords and can crawl 500,000 pages per month. For advanced users like businesses and agencies that are serious about search, MOZ Large Plan is a great option. You can track 15000 keywords and can crawl 1,250,000 pages per month.
MOZ Premium Plan is most popular for large SEO-focused agencies and in-house marketing teams. With this plan, you can track 30,000 keywords and can crawl 5,000,000 pages per month.
PRO TIP
Moz is the most beginner-friendly tool. It is too limited if you are serious about achieving sustainable SEO success, especially if you look after more than 1 website. Also, it doesn’t suggest new keyword opportunities.
Moz has limits on everything you wish to track: keywords, rankings, links, and projects in general. There are no on-demand data checks.
WordPress Themes
Genesis is a safe, fast, and extremely SEO friendly framework. It provides you with some brilliant behind-the-scenes features of your website and you can build whatever you want with these features, you don’t even have to be a designer or developer for it.
The Open Source Genesis Framework includes countless functionalities like:
- Search Engine Optimized
- Built-in security
- Affordable with one-time payment.
- Easy to install with simple layout and settings
- A wide range of StudioPress and third-party child themes to choose from
- Gutenberg-ready
- Google AdSense support
- Great tech support, help, forum, blog, documentation, community
- Simple options for customization and Customizer additional CSS field.
- Lifetime updates, and there’s lots of it.
Whether you’re a novice or advanced developer, you can quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress using Genesis Framework.
Divi is a complete design framework that allows you to design and customize every part of your website from the ground up. It gives you a full array of customization options to style any website and offers a graphical user interface that lets anyone design a site even if they have no coding experience.
The Visual Drag & Drop Divi Builder includes impressive features to deliver a truly useful multipurpose WordPress theme like:
- High quality content templates
- Reusable custom content
- Inline text editing
- Powerful page builder tool
- Lots of helpful documentation
- Regularly updated and improved
- Improved support system
- Good value purchase options
- Custom CSS control and responsive editing
- Global elements & styles
Divi theme is easy to use, so that, it can be used by freelancers, beginners, and advanced users. You will have to spend some time getting to grips with the user interface of the builder if you really want to get the most out of this theme. However, if you are in a hurry to get your new site online, the pre-built templates all look great and can be deployed very quickly.
Avada theme gives you the ultimate flexibility to design and style your websites with no knowledge of coding required. It is a powerful, fully responsive and has incredible options to easily and quickly customize an entire website. You can use it to build any type of website. Avada theme also includes the Fusion page builder.
This multipurpose WordPress theme built by ThemeFusion has incredible features like:
- Efficient inline editing
- Content intuitively
- SEO optimized
- Full typography control
- Fusion white label branding
- Advanced custom fields
- Comprehensive documentation
- Control design elements globally
- WooCommerce Integration and WPML
- Performance management
Avada theme is ideal for large projects like eCommerce. For bloggers and other small site owners, might not be able to fully enjoy this theme. Because this multipurpose theme is so extensive, you won’t be able to learn about all the functions without trying it out first. So, make sure that you spend some time playing around with this theme.
Email Marketing Solutions
Mailchimp, a simple and easy-to-use software, gives you the ability to create and manage mailing lists, newsletters, automated campaigns and more. It gives you access to an array of email marketing tools all conveniently located in one place. Mailchimp lets you stay in touch with groups of people via email.
The features of this All-In-One integrated powerful marketing platform are:
- Ready-to-Use campaign templates
- Best email designer
- Product recommendations
- Merge tags
- Advanced segmentation
- Distribution by time zone
- Comparative data report
- Campaign sharing on social media
- Advanced audience insights
- Multivariate testing and retargeting ads
Being an owner of a small business, if you are a bit scared of tech and haven’t ever used email marketing software before, then MailChimp is here for you. You can get started with Mailchimp for free and get beautiful designs without hiring a designer. You can easily integrate MailChimp and understand its stats and data.
Constant Contact is the most versatile email marketing platform. It lets you create forms that customers can use to sign up for emails and newsletters. Constant Contact also allows businesses to import customer data from spreadsheets or email clients, such as Gmail and Microsoft Outlook.
The features of this centralized platform of scheduling and sharing content include:
- Real-time campaign tracking
- Email list management and Email integrations
- Intuitive landing page editor
- List segmentation tools
- Duplicate contact management
- Social posts and monitoring
- Comprehensive image library
- Drag-and-drop email editor
- Email marketing automation
- Social analytics and engagement
If you are looking to improve your email marketing or get started on a new social network or wanted to grow your business then Constant Contact is the best practice for you. It has everything which a small business needs like to create effective campaigns with affordable plans and easy-to-use tools. You can send an unlimited number of emails, and prices are based on the number of subscribers on your contact list.
Drip, a cloud-based software, helps you to automate the process of visual email marketing campaigns. You can make communications and send targeted emails to many subscribers. It allows users to connect with applications through either its pre-built third-party integrations or its API, enabling them to extend its functionality and empower their business.
Drip has some awesome features when it comes to marketing automation, like their segmentation and targeting features. Other features are:
- Building and personalizing emails
- Manage email deliverability
- Automated email responses
- Landing pages and forms
- Mobile optimized
- Data quality management
- Automated alerts and tasks
- Basic reporting
- Web analytics
- Segmentation and data quality management
For the eCommerce website, Drip is the best email service, provider. Drip is considered an eCommerce customer relationship management platform. You can gather and organize customer data, then enable eCommerce retailers to use that data.
ConvertKit is a full-featured email service provider. It offers customizable sign-up forms and landing pages to help bring in more email subscribers. Its automation feature allows you to automatically send different emails to people based on the actions they’ve taken, such as clicking a link or opening a specific email, etc.
ConvertKit helps make that writing process smooth, clean, and quick. Some features of ConvertKit are:
- Subscriber tagging
- Customizable domain
- Automated funnels
- Send email broadcasts
- Unlimited landing pages & forms
- Marketing automation
- Send email sequences
- Subscriber management with unlimited traffic
- Report
- Visual automations
ConvertKit is designed for only one type of target audience: online creators like bloggers and YouTubers. This means that there aren’t a lot of eCommerce-focused features that you don’t need. It is extremely simple to use, even for beginners, because it has all basic features, plus some advanced automation features with a great support team and knowledgebase if you need help.
Sendinblue is a SaaS solution for relationship marketing. It boasts a fully-kitted, workflow-based automation feature. Sendinblue empowers businesses to build and grow relationships through marketing automation, email campaigns, transactional emails, SMS messages, chat, CRM, Facebook ads, and retargeting ads.
Sendinblue is one of the best tools for trigger-based and transactional emails. Some features of Sendinblue are:
- Event-triggered email
- Landing pages/web forms
- List management
- Dynamic content and image library
- Spam blocker and shared inboxes
- Whitelisting/blacklisting
- Routing and data recovery
- Website visitor tracking
- Reporting/analytics
- Customizable CTAs
SendinBlue is best for small to medium-sized businesses. Sendinblue’s email marketing platform was actually developed in response to one of the biggest challenges faced by small-to-medium businesses i-e: automating email marketing on a budget. It offers a free plan that allows users to create marketing campaigns without committing to a paid plan immediately. For commerce sites, it allows more advanced users to create and edit landing pages in their marketing campaigns.
Best WordPress Plugins
WordPress has a huge selection of available plugins. These Plugins are the building blocks of WordPress websites. WordPress Plugins are fantastic for extending existing functionality or adding new functionality to your WordPress website.
You can enhance the functionalities of your website easily by adding the relevant plugins. The WordPress Plugin Repository has over 56,000 plugins at the time of writing this post. Below is the list of 10 must-have plugins for every WordPress website.
WordPress Top 10 Plugins
Below are the top 10 WordPress plugins in our opinion, which most WordPress websites use or need it.
WPForms is the most beginner-friendly form builder plugin. You can create forms easily with a drag and drop builder. No coding needed! Everything happens directly on your website. WPForms has 100+ pre-built templates for your forms to meet your exact needs.
Conversational forms are a great feature in WPForms, they look great and are so engaging. Other features of WP Forms are:
- Smart conditional logic
- Instant notifications
- Entry management
- Marketing and subscriptions
- Easy to embed
- Spam protection
- Form templates
- Mobile friendly
You can create contact forms, online surveys, donation forms, order forms and other WordPress forms in just a few minutes without writing any code.
Yoast SEO Plugin, an accessible and user-friendly tool, used to operate a website and improve its rank. You can optimize your On-page SEO and can enter keyphrase or keyword which you would like to rank in Google search result page.
Yoast SEO is a WordPress SEO Plugin. Features of Yoast SEO plugin are:
- Content insights
- Redirect manager
- Focus keyword export
- Mark your links as no-follow or sponsored
- Works in the block editor and classic editor
- Internal linking suggestions
- Full control over your breadcrumbs
- Full control over your breadcrumbs
- Preview of your page
You can also prevent your RSS feed from content scrapers. Yoast SEO plugin helps you for fixing your flaws such as readability score, passive constructions, long sentences, grammatical errors, etc. This tool allows you to indicate one or several keywords which are subsequently analyzed on how frequently they appear in the copy.
Shared Count , a social sharing plugin, lets you to discover the most popular content and helps to retrieve counts from social sites. You can maintain your site’s performance with smart caching and lean assets. It doesn’t use tracking scripts, cookies or store any user information.
By using Shared Counts WordPress plugin, you can engage better and sell more products or services through your blog or site. Features of this plugin are:
- Share button styling options
- one-click option to retrieve both HTTP and HTTPS share count
- GDPR
- Improve site performance
- Developer friendly
- Customization options
- Display content with the most traffic by month or category
You can increase traffic and engagement by helping readers share your posts and pages to their friends on social media. It provides very liberal usage of hooks and filters. Everything is customizable and the possibilities are near limitless. You can also retrieve almost all share counts in a single request.
Optin Monster, a marketing plugin and ultimate popup builder, helps you to get more email subscribers, increase sales, and grow your business. The popups and newsletter opt-in forms are fully mobile responsive and optimized for both web and server performance, it will improve the website SEO too.
You can easily convert your website visitors into subscribers and customers using this plugin. Features of Optin Monster plugin are:
- Drag-and-Drop builder
- Multiple form types
- Conversion analytics
- Page-level targeting
- Effortless management
- Multiple campaign types and triggers
- Seamless integrations
- Actionable insights
You can also show personalized, relevant messages to your visitors based on their behavior to maximize lead, subscriber and sales growth across every page of your website using OptinMonster’s enterprise-grade targeting and segmentation engine.
Sucuri automatically checks your WordPress files and alerts you if any files have been added, modified, or removed. It offers a set of security features, each of them designed to have a positive effect on the security posture.
The Sucuri free WordPress security plugin offers:
- Security Activity Auditing
- File Integrity Monitoring
- Remote Malware Scanning
- Website Blacklist Monitoring
- Effective Security Hardening
- Post-Hack Security Actions
- Security Notifications
- Website Firewall
Sucuri creates multiple layers to safeguard your website from security threats. You can install Sucuri Securit plugin to protect your website from malware and hacks. It blocks any malware attack or hacker’s attempt to put your website at risk and you’ll get only real visitors.
UpdraftPlus is the best WordPress backup restore plugin. It is easy to use and gives all the basic features. You can set up automatic backup schedules. It is also useful to restore and migrate the websites. UpdraftPlus keeps your WordPress site safe by protecting from hacking, server crashes or dodgy updates.
Features of UpdraftPlus plugin are:
- Scheduling
- UpdraftVault Storage
- Remote Storage Options
- Security
- Reporting, Monitoring and Scheduling
- Restoring, Recovering and Migrating
- WordPress Network
- Multisite
UpdraftPlus provides an easy-to-use interface that makes it easy to back up your WordPress site even if you’re an absolute beginner. You can easily take backup, schedule, and restore your WordPress files and databases. It allows you to perform complete, manual, or scheduled backups quickly and easily.
WP Rocket is one of the best WordPress caching plugin. It helps to speed up your WordPress website, drag more traffic, and increase conversions—it the most user-friendly caching plugin around, with the most straightforward setup.
Features of WP Rocket are:
- Quick setup and page caching
- Sitemap preloading
- Database and Google fonts optimization
- Minification / Concatenation
- DNS prefetching
- eCommerce friendly
- Multilingual compatibility and developer friendly
- Connected users
This caching plugin creates an ultra-fast load time which is essential for improving Search Engine Optimization. WP Rocket is a tool in the CMS Tools category of a tech stack.
ThirstyAffiliates is an affiliate link management plugin for WordPress that gives you full control over your affiliate links. It gives bloggers the tools they need to monetize their WordPress website with affiliate marketing.
The plugin allows you to add an affiliate directly to the WordPress page/post editor.
Features of Thirsty Affiliates are:
- Automatic Keyword Linking
- Advanced Statistics Reports
- Geolocations
- Better link management
- Google Click Events
- Amazon API Importing
- High speed HTAccess redirect
- Link Event Notification Emails
- Automatic Link Health Checker
You can create affiliate links for your products and manage them easily with the features available in the plugin. ThirstyAffiliates comes with built-in reports so you can explore, over-time, how much your affiliate links have been clicked and what is popular on your site.
WP Mail SMTP allows you to send WordPress emails using an SMTP server. You can make email deliverability easy and reliable. It also fixes your email deliverability by reconfiguring WordPress to use a proper SMTP provider when sending emails.
- White glove setup
- Manage notifications
- Authenticate the accounts
- Email log
- Gmail / G Suite
- Mailgun
- SMTP.com
WP Mail SMTP is the easiest way to fix WordPress email delivery and ensure your emails reach the inbox. It makes sure that your emails don’t get caught up in aggressive spam filters.
MonsterInsightsis the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily add, customize, and manage the Google Analytics website tracking services on your WordPress site.
Features of MonsterInsights are:
- Google analytics
- Tracking code
- Real-time stats
- Popular sources
- Enhanced ecommerce tracking
- Page level analytics
- EU compliance (GDPR Friendly)
- Affiliate link & Ads tracking
You can also Setup tracking for authors, categories, tags, searches, custom post types, users, and other events with 1-click. You will get Get real-time stats right inside WordPress to see who is online, what they are doing, and more