Recommended Resources

This is where I register the majority of my domains. They’re cheap, easy to use and they provide free WhoIsGuard privacy protection. This keeps your confidential information safe, helps reduce spam and protects you against identity theft.

They are very similar to NameCheap but offer almost every domain extension (i.e. .com, .org, .us, .co.uk, etc.) you could want. I registered my shortened domain name (i-hab.it) with GoDaddy because NameCheap didn’t offer the extension I wanted.

The Genesis Framework powers all StudioPress themes. This robust framework is written with the latest coding standards and makes sure your theme is secure amongst other features. It also makes future development of your blog easier. StudioPress have a very strong user community and high-quality customer support. Their themes are popular amongst many pro bloggers. For these reasons, I chose a StudioPress theme for this blog. I highly recommend them.

Though I should add, if you’re not able to code, you’re likely better off choosing one of the following themes.

If you want a lightweight responsive theme that’s focused on performance, look no further than GeneratePress. It’s easily one of my favourite block-based freemium themes. It has everything you’d want from a theme and comes with access to their priority support forums if you get the premium version, which I strongly recommend.

GeneratePress has a great library of professionally designed website templates to help you get started. It also follows Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 standards to ensure that no visitor is left out.

It’s the most mature of the available DIY themes for WordPress, and it’s for that reason I’ve listed it before most of my other recommendations.

I’ve recently used GeneratePress for another project and I love it.

Blocksy is a lightweight, fast, fully responsive, Gutenberg ready WordPress theme. It’s well coded and was built and designed to work with the most popular WordPress page builders.

It has a very intuitive drag and drop header and footer builder, a variety of layouts, WooCommerce integration, and a tonne of other features which allow you to create nearly any design you can imagine.

The Blocksy developers are very responsive and quickly reply to questions and inquiries. They’re also extremely passionate and care about their work.

At the time of writing, I’d argue that this is currently the best free theme available for WordPress. In fact, the free Blocksy theme will likely be more than enough for many WordPress users.

The StudioPress theme that I’m currently using on InternetHabits is no longer being developed, so I’ll be likely be changing my theme in the near future. Blocksy Pro is currently top of my list for the theme I’ll be switching to. Need I say more?

There’s not much I can say about Kadence that I haven’t already said about Blocksy. There are a lot of similarities between the two themes. They both have a free and pro version of their themes. Kadence has also released Kadence Blocks, which will help you build websites easily with their block builder, no code required. There’s also Kadence Conversions that will enable you to create pop-ups and banners, etc. though that isn’t free, so I’d only consider it if you’re planning to purchase the Full Bundle package from Kadence.

If you’re settled on choosing this type of theme, I’d take a look at the features and site templates that Blocksy and Kadence have to offer and choose your favourite theme of the two.

Another extremely popular theme that’s lightweight and built for performance. They offer a library full of pre-built website templates that you can import if you want to jump start your blogs design, including many created using the 2 of the Page Builders I recommend below.

Thrive Theme Builder comes with their conversion focused theme, Shapeshift. It’s bundled with a light version of their page builder too, Thrive Architect, so you’ll have a fantastic-looking blog in no time. It’ll allow you to build landing pages, sales pages, etc. Think LeadPages but at a lower cost.

Update: Thrive Themes have updated their business model so now you can get access to all Thrive’s plugins as part of Thrive Suite.

This involves paying an annual fee (unless you buy the lifetime access) but it gives you access to all their professional themes, including the extremely popular Divi, making it a fantastic bargain.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for from the options above, the final place I recommend you take a look is MyThemeShop. Fast, responsive themes that are easy to customise and compatible with all major browsers. To make things even easier, MyThemeShop provide their customers with narrated video tutorials so you’ll have no problems changing your website layout. Plus, they offer 24×7 support, just in case.

CloudFlare is one of, if not the largest CDN company in the world. Their free plan provides you with their CDN, caching and basic DDoS protection. You’ll have to upgrade to a paid account if you want access to their advanced features, including better front-end security for your website.

You could combine their free account to take advantage of the DDoS protection with one of the better CDNs listed below.

If you pick up hosting from my recommendation above, BlueHost, then you can get CloudFlare for free as part of your hosting package.

A brilliant CDN that unlike CloudFlare focuses entirely on speeding up your content delivery. If you want to speed up your site, improve user experience and reduce your server load, I recommend checking out Bunny.net. Plus, Google have stated that faster sites tend to rank higher in search engines.

Bunny.net offers two pay-as-you-go plans with a $1 minimum usage each month. A blog with a good amount of traffic is usually in the 20-25GB bandwidth range. If you have this amount of traffic or less, it will cost you just $1 per month to get started with Bunny.net and have them supercharge your site from multiple servers, also known as points of presence (PoPs), all over the world.

iThemes Security Pro is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to secure and protect your website. It will help to prevent WordPress hacks, security breaches, malware and more. Its WordPress malware scan feature is powered by Securi SiteCheck. This uses a 10-point check to scan your site for known malware, blacklist status, website errors and out-of-date software.

Add an extra layer of protection to your site and keep the bad guys out.

If you want to keep your blog secure against cyber attacks then check out Securi. They’ll secure your website and prevent future break-ins. If your site becomes infected, they’ll clean and repair it. Securi will also send you alerts if their monitoring service finds anything you need to know about. It’ll give you peace of mind.

Let’s face it, even with the best security, there’s still a chance your site could get hacked and infected with malware. That’s where Malcare comes in. It scans your website for malware using its own servers to make sure no load is placed on your hosting server. That way, your website will always run at peaks speeds. A less resource intensive alternative to the popular WordFence plugin.

The premium version boasts a 1-click malware removal feature for instant automatic cleanup if your website is infected. It also has security and website management features such as login protection, website hardening and a powerful Web Application Firewall (WAF).

The new kid on the block for website security. Not only will Astra keep your website secure via their 24×7 real-time firewall, they also have an automatic malware scanner that will help to identify and remove every kind of malware without slowing down your website.

There’s also blacklist reputation monitoring, DDoS protection, bad bots protection and much more. A fantastic all-in-one solution for securing WordPress.

This WordPress plugin does exactly what its name suggests. It limits the number of times someone can attempt to login to your WordPress admin panel. iThemes Security also has this feature.

It doesn’t get much simpler than this. Install and activate this free plugin to protect your site against malicious URL requests.

For small to medium-sized websites, I recommend BackupBuddy. This WordPress plugin is easy to use and allows you to save your backups to an off-site location, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 or their own cloud storage ‘BackupBuddy Stash’. It also includes an easy to use restore function and a migration tool that allows you to move your entire site to another domain or host.

I currently use this plugin on my websites that don’t have an automated backup performed by the website host. I am “grandfathered in” thanks to a special lifetime offer from iThemes.

Like Backupbuddy, BlogVault offers backup archives and real-time incremental backups. This means that after the initial full backup, it only creates a backup of the files that have been modified instead of copying all your files each time a backup runs. This helps to prevent overload on your hosting server. It performs your backup almost instantly instead of at a scheduled time.

BlogVault also provides free offsite storage and inbuilt free staging so you can safely test your website updates and changes before you make them live.

ConvertKit is a wonderfully powerful and cost effective tag-based email marketing service that has been built from the ground up for bloggers.

They offer a similar service to the alternatives listed below but with an easier learning curve. If you’re not comfortable coding, then ConvertKit may be a better match for you.

When building your email list, you can tag your subscribers based on their actions and interests. This allows you to send highly targeted emails specific to their individual needs. Targeted emails lead to better open rates and thus improved engagement with your subscribers.

Once you have subscribers, ConvertKit have an easy to use email editor with access to custom email templates which you can use to send unlimited emails.

Thanks to their user-friendly interface, setting up automations is extremely easy.

ConvertKit allows you to set up powerful automations via their visual automations editor. In addition to this, they provide tried and tested pre-built automation templates that allow you to have your autoresponder up and running in no time.

In other words, if you’re looking to get up and running quickly and easily, ConvertKit is a great choice.

Other notable features include: good integrations with 3rd-party apps, broadcast resend, forms, landing pages, and A/B testing on automation emails.

ConvertKit’s live chat and email support is second to none. Plus, they have an extremely active community in their Facebook group. Lots of happy users all helping each other out.

If you think ConvertKit would be a good match for you, head over to their website and sign up for an account. I highly recommend them.

They offer a Free Plan or a free trial of their paid plans. They also have a 30-day refund policy so if you decide they’re not for you, simply let them know within 30 days of signing up and it won’t cost you a penny.

If you’re on a tighter budget, MailerLite may be email marketing solution for you.

At the time of writing, they offer a very similar feature set to ConvertKit. They too have a free plan for up to 1,000 subscribers but there are quite a few key features missing and you’re limited to 12,000 emails per month, so I’d take that into consideration before you decide. However, their free plan includes email automation and that’s a massive plus!

MailerLite provide 24/7 live chat and email support for their paid plans and 24/7 email support for their free plan so should you run into any problems, you’ll always have help on hand.

If you’re looking to introduce email marketing into your business whilst on a budget, look no further than MailerLite.

ActiveCampaign is another tag-based email marketing system that is arguably the most powerful in terms of automation.

As I mentioned in the hosting section of this page, I see the internet marketing community recommend Liquid Web more than any other host. Well, ActiceCampaign gets that crown in the email marketing space.

They have great integration with 3rd-party apps, a lovely workflow visual editor, and A/B testing on automation & broadcast emails.

One of my favourite features is their automation marketplace. It allows you to share and install other users automations. This is extremely powerful and can save you a lot of time.

ActiveCampaign offers great support via email and live chat. They don’t have a Facebook group but instead choose to host their community via a forum on their website.

This social sharing WordPress plugin is a newcomer compared to the likes of Social Warfare, but it’s packed with a lot of functionality. There’s social sharing buttons for over 30 of the most popular social networks that you can place in multiple places on your blog, style customization, share counts, social meta tags, click-to-tweet, advanced statistics and a number of handy add-ons.

In comparison to a lot of its competition, it’s very easy to set up. Plus, Social Snap was carefully built with performance and security in mind so it won’t slow down your website.

You know the social media share buttons that are at the top, bottom and hovering at the side of blog posts? That’s what this WordPress plugin does. You can also create in-post shareable quotes for Twitter, via the click-to-tweet function. It supports all the popular social networks and you can customise the look of the buttons to match your website branding. It’s also built with performance in mind so it won’t slow down your site.

This awesome plugin makes it easy to create opt-in forms with its simple drag-and-drop editor. You can create pop-up lightboxes, “sticky” ribbons, opt-in forms, 2-step opt-in forms, and slide-ins all within the same plugin. It also has great segmentation and built-in split testing to help boost your conversions further. I’m very glad I found this little gem. Highly recommended!

You can get access to Thrive Leads as part of Thrive Suite.

With similar features to Thrive Leads, Optin Monster is one of the best lead generation softwares available for your website. With the ability to create beautiful opt-in forms in minutes, you’ll be well on your way to growing your email list in no time.

Take your opt-in form creation and lead generation to another level with this software platform. ConvertBox is the new kid on the block and it’s hands down the easiest to use.

As with the alternative solutions, there’s multiple styles of opt-in forms you can choose from to deliver high-converting messages. There’s lead segmentation, deep integration with your email marketing software, and the ability to show you message to the right visitor at the right time. You can even target specific visitors with personalised messages using powerful behaviour targeting rules.

Plus, if you really take your marketing seriously, you can split test your opt-in forms and track everything in real-time with their detailed analytics.

The flexibility of what you can do with this platform is outstanding. In fact, there’s too many features to list here. I highly recommend you check out ConvertBox.

Face it, people love to take a quiz. They’re much more fun than a survey, and they make you curious to find out your result. Interact is a tool for creating online quizzes. You can use it to segment your audience based on how they answer a question or dependent on their results.

Interact can also be used to personalize your website and most importantly, to grow your email list/capture leads. It integrates with most major email marketing and marketing automation systems.

If you need additional ways to interact with your audience, check out Involve.me below.

If you need to create interactive content for your website such as quizzes, surveys, calculators, and forms, Involve.me could be the platform you need.

It’s a great tool for gathering feedback from your audience and used correctly, it can be used to rapidly grow your number of email subscribers. Involve.me can even be used to create payment forms, landing pages and sales funnels.

Do you want to run viral giveaways, contests and sweepstakes? What about a viral product launch? You can do it all with UpViral. Get your visitors to bring you even more visitors by enticing them with a prize or reward if they invite their friends or followers. UpViral will then follow-up with those that take part, emailing reminders, setting goals, and providing ongoing incentives to keep them promoting to increase their chance of winning.

The result? A potential huge increase in traffic and subscribers. Powerful!

This is an alternative to UpViral. Viral Loops is an all-in-one referral marketing platform that helps you create viral giveaways, contests, and rewards. They provide tried and tested templates that let you design custom referral programs in minutes without having to reinvent the wheel.

Referrals are one of the most powerful marketing and sales tools available.

If you’d prefer to use a WordPress plugin instead, I recommend RafflePress. You can find more information in the WordPress plugins section further down this page.

This is the best tool available for creating high-quality mobile responsive landing pages with ease. With a huge selection of templates that are proven to convert your viewers into subscribers (or buyers), you’ll be able to create opt-in, sales, webinar, and thank you pages within minutes. If you want to customise these templates or build a page from scratch, you can via their drag-and-drop visual page editor. LeadPages has an awesome built-in split testing feature and works with both WordPress and non-WordPress sites.

There’s also a list building feature they call LeadBoxes that allows you to create pop-ups, 2-step opt-in forms and exit pops.

As a key goal of a landing page is to collect email addresses, LeadPages integrates with all major email marketing providers, plus other marketing and sales applications.

With regards to building landing pages, ClickFunnels is similar to LeadPages. It too provides a large selection of templates, a drag-and-drop page editor and list building features. There’s also integrations with all major marketing and sales applications.

Where ClickFunnels shines is its ability to link all of your marketing pages together to form smart sales funnels. With a few clicks of your mouse, you can create a load of different sales funnels, including opt-in funnels, sales funnels, webinar funnels, membership sites, and more!

For those of you that want a cheaper alternative to LeadPages, I recommend OptimizePress. Although it’s not as easy to use as LeadPages, it’s a lot more flexible so you’ll be able to create pretty much any kind of page you need. Please note that unlike LeadPages, OptimizePress only works with WordPress websites.

Another cost efficient choice is Thrive Architect. The team at Thrive Themes provide you with dozens of conversion optimised landing page templates. You can edit these and build pages from scratch with the drag-and-drop page builder. I’ve used this WordPress plugin to build entire websites. You can get access to it as part of Thrive Suite.

Thrive Architect will work on any WordPress theme. It’s not limited to Thrive themes.

On the subject of page builders, Beaver Builder is a great plugin that makes modifying existing themes easy with their drag-and-drop builder.

Let’s say you have a theme but you can’t get your homepage (or any other post or page) to look the way you’d like it to. Activate Beaver Builder and edit away. No coding required!

Their front end editor allows you to see what you’re doing and gives you total control over the layout of your pages. It’s as easy and dragging and dropping.

The Beaver Builder page builder can be used with any theme. In fact, Beaver Builder also has an optional framework theme. It’s great if you’re looking for a highly customisable, well-supported, theme.

When I say well-supported, I mean it. Their support is amazing. They really do go above and beyond.

I couldn’t mention Beaver Builder without also mentioning Elementor. They’re both great WordPress page builder plugins. You’d have to compare both to see which best suits your individual requirements.

Elementor is another page builder with drag-and-drop functionality that becomes even more powerful if you purchase the Pro version. It unlocks the page builders full potential and allows you to design and build high-quality websites without having to edit complicated code.

This includes the ability to design Headers and Footers which means you really can control the look of every single part of your website.

As you’d expect, it works seamlessly with almost any WordPress theme.

The less spam you have to deal with on your blog, the better. Akismet will help you in the fight against comment spam.

Increase the performance of your WordPress site by eliminating render-blocking JavaScript in above-the-fold content. I cover this in more details in my How To Speed Up WordPress Optimization Guide.

This is another plugin that will help to improve the performance of your WordPress site. It can concatenate scripts and styles, minify and compress them. For a more detailed explanation, check out my WordPress Optimization Guide.

If you want to run a forum on your WordPress site, then I recommend this plugin. You can also add several other features to your forum using the additional bbPress plugins.

If you want an easy way to promote your content on Twitter, take a look at Better Click To Tweet. This allows you to create a message that you’d like others to share into a custom link. When that link is clicked, the visitor will automatically have your message added to their Twitter status box. Then they simply click to tweet the message to their followers.

BJ Lazy Load prevents all images on your page from loading at once. Instead, it loads them when your site visitor scrolls to that section of the page. This improves page load times.

If you choose to use the Bunny.net Content Delivery Network mentioned above (jump to that section), this plugin will help you easily integrate it in WordPress.

This is a really easy-to-use WordPress cache plugin that will improve the performance of your website. It works really well with a number of other WordPress performance plugins.

Simple, easy to use contact form plugin that’s free.

If you want to change the default comments on your WordPress blog, you need to check out Disqus. It will help you fight against spam and reduce server load to prevent website slow down.

If you use the Amazon affiliate program, EasyAzon will help you make more commissions and save you a lot of time in the process. You can add Amazon affiliate links from within your WordPress dashboard. If a user visits your site from a different country, using link localisation you can redirect them to their local Amazon store. This way you won’t miss out on your commission (you need to be a member of each countries Amazon affiliate program for this).

There’s also an “Add to cart” feature that increases the number of days you can be credited for a sale if your website visitor makes a purchase from Amazon. To see the plugin in action, visit My Bookshelf.

This is a lightweight competitor of Gravity Forms. Creating a form is easy with the drag-and-drop builder and huge choice of templates. There’s so many features and plenty of key third-party integrations. It’s a very powerful WordPress forms plugin.

If you need a form for pretty much anything on your blog, Gravity Forms has you covered. This is more advanced than Contact Form 7 (mentioned above) with added functionality.

This plugin makes it extremely easy to add Google Analytics to your blog and always stays up to date with the newest features in Google Analytics.

If you want to add responsive tables to your WordPress site, this plugin is what you need. It’s from the same team as the developers of WP Fluent Forms and it integrates with it too. There’s so many different styles of table you can create with this plugin and its optimized for performance, so it’s blazing fast! Highly recommended.