What do we recommend for your site?
We've been creating and using WordPress sites for years and have come across more plugins, themes, and related tools than we can keep track of. There are some, though, that have stood out as champions for us. The website-related tools listed here are ones we actually use ourselves, and are marked by a combination of excellent functionality, a solid UI, and quality support.
Disclaimer: yes, some of these are affiliate links -- feel free to not click on them -- but they are only listed here because we use them regularly and love them.
While we love using Imagify to optimize all of our images on the fly, we also got the opportunity to try out ShortPixel and we were impressed! While Imagify does the job fine, ShortPixel goes above and beyond by providing cross-conversion to webp format.
Don't let your website get bogged down with over-sized images. Imagify is our recommended image optimizer; we use it on every site we build or optimize. It's functional, it's beautiful, and it works like a charm.
We've tried every major WordPress caching plugin out there and finally found WP Rocket. We haven't looked back since. With simple set-up and a ton of available options, it works great with every plugin and theme we've encountered. Combined with our nginx/php-fpm processing, it makes for blazing speeds. Already a Websavers client? Contact us for an exclusive discount on WP Rocket!
In a world full of page building plugins for WordPress, it's been hard to find one that we could really bank on for ease of use and the ability to build complex and beautiful websites. Well, no longer; Beaver Builder is our top choice for WordPress page builder tools.
We were recently invited to give Visual Composer a try, and wow were we ever impressed! It is featured-packed and lightning-fast. With lots of options in their free version, and even more features available in their Pro version - including custom-built header / footer elements and much more. Don't confuse it with WPBakery's Page Builder - it's come so much further.
Have a hard time remembering all your passwords? Currently recording them in a notebook insecurely? Never again! Save all your passwords to LastPass and access them with one super-strong password. Now you only need to remember ONE password!
Need a way to send thousands of messages out in a newsletter or bulletin to your clients or friends? Shared hosting isn't quite enough as there are imposed outgoing limits, and while you could set up a VPS to do this, we suggest trying out MailChimp! It's a dedicated mailing list service with features designed exactly for this purpose.
Love our 1-click web apps that helps you manage your WordPress installs and keep on top of updates, but need more? We recommend MainWP! Rather than a subscription service, you pay one-time to gain access to complete WordPress management including standardization of settings and plugins.
There's a lot of form builders for WordPress, so why do we use and recommend WPForms? For us, it always comes back to simplicity. WPForms allows us to not only build great looking forms, but most importantly makes it as easy as possible for our clients to edit them in the future.
Need an easy way to change your IP whenever you want? Want to route all your Internet requests through another country or province? Looking for a way to anonymize your connectivity? A VPN will help you with all of these things! We use PrivateInternetAccess for all of these purposes on a daily basis.
Want to connect your site to Google for easy analytics integration, tag manager, or virtually anything in the Google-sphere? Site Kit is the answer! The official WordPress plugin by Google means you won't be getting annoying notifications to pay for more things (perhaps a bit ironic given they're the ad-kings of the Internet).
Want to build beautiful opt-ins for your site, connecting to virtually any service, but don't want to rely on external services or slow down your PageSpeed scores? Say hello to ConvertPro. This plugin makes it easy to build various types of opt-in forms, connect to everything from Aweber to Zapier, and has a beautiful editor allowing you to optimize your forms for desktop and mobile devices alike.
Looking for the best way to optimize your site for search engines? Well you've found it. SEOPress free provides a ton of great features, and the pro version takes it to a whole new level. Check it out below.