Below you’ll find resources I recommended to grow your blog, your business or website. Of course I mention resources that I only trust, I use and can help to your online success.
Here you can find free-stuff and some paid tools also.
This page is a constant work in progress, so expect more useful tools coming!
Hosting
Hostgator – is a leader company with an outstanding 24/7 support, really! I had some doubts on different weekends (twice) and I tried their customer support by chat and email – fast and helpful responses. Not all the hosting providers assist you in that way, less in not “normal” working days.
Hostgator has three different plans that can fit your budget and technical requirements. Ideal for WordPress Blogs with a simple 1-click installation.
Analytics
- Google Analytics. Free, popular and tremendously flexible when you need to know about what’s “cooking” in terms of traffic of your blog or website. You can use GA even if you use other stat-services.
- Clicky. I use Clicky and the most important characteristic is their real-time stats – so handy to see sources and traffic coming to your site. Match perfect with GA because it supplies different and intuitive interface data.
Keyword Research
Google Keyword Tool – You can research keywords for create blogs, websites or to improve your blog posts.
WordPress Headway Theme
This blog is powered by Headway theme. Do you like it?
Headway has a Visual Editor that lets you change by “drag and drop” and with easy settings, really in a snap of your fingers.
You can modify the layout, colors, fonts, backgrounds and lot of more, verifying the changes in real time, without coding.
Headway Benefits
- Save time: you don’t need to be a coder to use it. Spend your time creating content and not coding, coding…and more coding, to see some results.
- Have infinite themes in one package: you choose exactly what you want with the Visual Editor.
- Improve rankings of your posts and site: Why? Because, Headway Themes is completely SEO-friendly. Also, you’ll avoid many SEO-plugins because their functions are already pre-installed.
- Headway theme is ideal for bloggers/webmasters that need a premium theme, without being tech savvy.
- On the contrary, if you enjoy coding, you can have infinite combinations accessible via the live CSS editor, Hooks and more.
In my case I didn’t want to become an “expert coder”, to have my site up and running, in few days. This is the reason why I chose Headway for this blog.
Check out my Headway WordPress Theme Review: Why It Made My Life Easier
WordPress Plugins
These are some the plugins used on Sweets Foods Blog that improve functionality, design and other functions.
Certainly, this list is a constant task, then stay tuned.
CommentLuv Premium – An 8-1 multi-plugin that allows controlling spam, more social share, controlling keywords on your name @ keywords, etc. Visit my full article about CommentLuv Premium Plugin Review.
Broken Link Checker – finds permanently broken links in your own site plus outgoing links, notifying you on the dashboard.
Contact Form 7 – you can test it in my contact page. It’s a contact form plugin full customizable more Captcha protection – I recommend to allow Captcha to avoid spam and it’s more secure.
G.A.S.P. – Add a simple checkbox to your comment area and you’ve to check it to do a comment. No need of Captcha. ( (included now on CommentLuv Premium)
Google Analytics for WordPress – you can set up your GA account on WordPress.
Google XML Sitemaps – generates an active sitemap to help your site to become more search engine friendly.
KeywordLuv – allows commenters entering their keywords with a specific anchor text like: Your Name@Your Keywords. A precision, don’t put only keywords as your name, because you’ve a name, right? Don’t make these social media mistakes. (included now on CommentLuv Premium)
Redirection – you’ve changed an URL, no problem. This can be useful to fix broken links. I use it after I did my transition from Blogger to WordPress.
ReplyMe – it’ll send you an email when someone has replied to your comment directly.
Subscribe to Comments – commenters will receive by email, all new comments added to the posts they have commented. For the blog owner has the benefit of seeing for each post the comment subscriptions.
Top Commentators Widget – reward people who comment on your blog. It’s customizable, reset period every week, month, etc.; number of names to show, links and many more.
W3 Total Cache – helps to speed up your loading time and necessary in high peaks of traffic.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – looks for related posts on your site to display in every post, to improve the visits of your readers and encouraging visitors to read more other articles related you’ve written.
