Many things can make or break your WordPress website, including hosting, themes, and plugins. Your choices matter! So, it doesn’t surprise me that many people ask me what I use and recommend – either when I start designing their website or maintaining it.

To help you, I have compiled a list of my favourite tools and services. For some categories, I have one clear favourite, while for others, I recommend more than one.

Hosting

Your website lives on a special computer called a hosting server. Small business owners rent space on hosting servers from hosting providers. Choosing a good hosting provider is important. But, how do you choose?

  • Technical specs
  • Service

I recommend an Australian company – VentraIP.

ventraip

Theme Frameworks

Theme frameworks give you and your designer control over how your website looks. But, many themes are poorly coded, which makes them slow to load. Google doesn’t like this.

There are several good ones, including Kadence and Never. But I recommend GeneratePress.

generatepress logo

Block Builders

You can use two types of tools to build a WordPress website – page builders and block builders (block libraries).

I always use block builders and recommend you do the same. If you still use page builders, avoid bloated ones like Elementor, WP Bakery & Divi. Go for either Bricks or Seedprod.

My main bock builder is GenerateBlocks, which I supplement with Kadence Blocks and the default WordPress blocks.

gb logo black
kadencewp

SEO Plugins

SEO plugins can help you do the work needed to rank better on Google. But some bloated and slow your site down with unnecessary features.

For a bare-bones solution, go with the SEO Framework. If I want more features without bloat, I go with SEOPress.

seopress logo
seo framework logo

SEO Tools

I use POP (Page Optimiser Pro) to help with on-page SEO decisions and SE Ranking to help with keyword research and competitor analysis.

For a bare-bones solution, go with the SEO Framework. If I want more features without bloat, I go with SEOPress.

pop logo
seranking logo

Security

WordPress security begins at the hosting server level, another reason I suggest hosting with VentraIP.

I like Patchstack‘s Web Application Firewall, although Wordfence also has a great one. Patchstack also offers virtual patching.

Of course, some security, such as plugin updates and protection of login conditionals, must be done manually.

patchstack
wordfence
ventraip

Site Speed & Core Web Vitals

Many factors help your site to load quickly, including great hosting (VentraIP), a well-coded theme framework (GeneratePress) and a lightweight block builder (GenerateBlocks).

However, some resources are solely devoted to improving your site speed. I recommend LiteSpeed Cache for caching and image optimisation, but your host needs to use Litespeed servers (VentraIP does). I use Brian Jackson’s Perfmatters to help optimise code.

litespeed logo
perfmatters logo