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I register the majority of my domains here. They’re cheap, easy to use, and 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 (ihab.it) with GoDaddy because NameCheap didn’t offer the extension I wanted.

All my websites begin life hosted on Bluehost. It’s where I’d point you if you’re building your first site. “1-click” WordPress installation, a FREE domain for the first year, and support on the end of the phone at any hour. You can be live this afternoon without ever having to meet a server.

I’ll be honest with you, though. Search for reviews, and you’ll find people who really don’t like it. That’s genuine, and I’m not going to pretend it away.

Here’s why it’s still my pick for a first site: the measurements got better. In the 2026 round of independent testing, it took Top Tier in its price bracket, came through the load test at 41ms with zero errors, and its benchmark score more than doubled. I go on what I can measure, not on how loud the reviews are in either direction.

One thing to plan for. That headline price is an introductory rate, and it rises when you renew. Budget for year two, not just year one.

If you’re in the UK, this is the one I’d point you to.

Krystal is UK-owned, with UK data centres, UK-based support and a certified B Corp. What sets it apart isn’t a feature list; it’s how it treats its customers.

Their reputation is the cleanest of any host I looked at, and you don’t have to take my word for it. They hold one of the highest review scores in the business, and the bit that actually matters is that the review platform flags those reviews as unprompted rather than invited. That’s the difference between a score customers chose to leave and a score a company went out and asked for.

Want the real test, though? Search “krystal hosting complaints” and see what comes back. When I checked, the top result was Krystal’s own complaints procedure. Not an angry forum thread. Their own page that tells you how to complain about them. Companies with something to hide don’t rank for that.

They weren’t the quickest of the UK hosts in the 2026 testing, comfortably inside the pack, but not leading it. I’d take UK-based support and a clean record over a few milliseconds every time.

The other UK option worth knowing about, and the one to choose if speed is what you care about most.

20i posted the fastest London result of the five UK hosts in the 2026 independent testing. They’re also unusual in running their own platform rather than reselling someone else’s, which is why they can price the way they do.

I’ve made Krystal the pick because UK-based support and a spotless complaints record are what I’d want if it were my first proper host.

Lightning Base is the quiet one, and it has the longest track record in the business. It took Top Tier in the independent benchmarks every year from 2014 through to the 2026 round. No other host in that testing has a run like it. That isn’t a claim about being the fastest on any given day. It’s a claim about never having a bad year, which matters more over the life of a website.

They set up caching and a CDN for you, run backups at several levels, and host only WordPress, so their support has only one thing to be good at.

A word of warning, and it’s an unusual one. Barely anybody reviews them. Go looking, and you’ll find a handful of reviews and nothing recent, which means you can’t sanity-check this one the way you can the others. You’d be going on that benchmark record and not much else. I’d rather tell you that myself than have you find it and wonder why I didn’t mention it.

Managed WordPress hosting built around security and support rather than raw speed. You get staging, automatic backups and malware scanning — and if your site is hacked, WPX will remove the malware for free.

It’s a sensible option if you run several WordPress sites and want the maintenance side handled for you.

Managed WordPress hosting at its finest.

Their features include Nginx, HTTP/2 SSL support, SSD storage, PHP7, MariaDB, and multi-caching for speed and performance. Plus, there are free site migrations, staging sites, free SSL certificates, and automated backups for convenience, testing, and peace of mind.

Cloudways is the one to look at if you’re running several sites rather than one. Most managed hosts charge you per WordPress install… add a fourth site, and you move up a plan. Cloudways charges for the server instead, and you put as many sites on it as its memory will carry. If you’ve got three or four projects on the go, that’s a different shape of bill entirely.

You choose which cloud platform sits underneath: Linode, Vultr, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud, and Cloudways manages it on top.

Worth knowing before you commit: by the 2026 testing, their load-test results had slipped against their own earlier form, and support has had a rockier reputation since the company changed hands. It’s on this list for how it charges, not for being the quickest.

When a site earns enough that an hour of downtime costs more than a month of hosting, this is the tier you move to. Kinsta runs on Google Cloud’s premium network, scales automatically, and includes the things you’d otherwise buy separately: CDN, staging, free migrations, and a hack-fix guarantee, meaning that if your site is ever compromised, fixing it is their problem, not your weekend’s. How’s that for service?

Kinsta has partnered with Cloudflare, a real-time, HTTP/2-powered CDN, to speed up the delivery of your assets (images, JS, CSS) around the globe.

It took G2’s number one spot for web hosting in 2026 and recorded the highest benchmark score among managed hosts measured that year.

Two honest caveats. Kinsta doesn’t participate in the open load-testing programmes, so nobody, myself included, can show you a like-for-like comparison against the hosts that do. And in the 2026 monitoring, its uptime came in slightly below its peers, with roughly two and a half hours of downtime. It’s still my premium pick. I’d just rather you heard both of those from me than find them later.

If Kinsta is the premium pick, Pressable is the one with the best homework.

It’s the only host I looked at that entered every tier of the 2026 independent testing and took Top Tier in all of them, with static response times measured in single-digit milliseconds and a clean sweep on uptime. When I say a host is well-evidenced, this is what I mean: it submitted to all the testing I reviewed and passed everything.

It’s priced per WordPress install with a visits allowance, so it’s tidiest when you’ve got one site you care about rather than a collection of sites.

For balance, it’s a company with a smaller review base than the big names, and most of those reviews came from customers who were asked to leave them. It’s now owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

If your site has outgrown shared hosting and you’re running it as a business rather than a hobby, this is the one on the list built for that. It isn’t where I’d send you for a first blog; that’s Bluehost, further up.

Two things make it worth naming. Review Signal’s 2026 round placed it eighth of thirty-four, in the Strong tier, with a sixty-millisecond load time. And daily backups and staging sites come with every plan, so a bad update is something you roll back rather than rebuild from.

Being straight with you: on raw response time, it’s mid-table: 497 milliseconds on Hostingstep’s measurements, eleventh of seventeen. It’s steady rather than quick. And it was restructured in April 2026, so you’ll now see it branded “Liquid Web by Nexcess” after CloudOne Digital brought it and Servers.com under one roof. Nothing alarming about that, but you’d meet the name change at signup, and I’d rather you heard it here.

For transparency, since people ask, Internet Habits itself runs on MechanicWeb, on a LiteSpeed server with LiteSpeed Cache handling the caching.

I’m including that because you should know where this site lives, not because I’m recommending it. It’s a small host, and there’s very little recent independent data on it, so I can’t show you measurements I’ve shared for the others. If you want hosting backed by benchmarking data, check the other hosts I’ve listed.

If you want a lightweight, responsive theme 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 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.

Bricks is what this site runs on. It’s a theme and a visual builder in the same package, so you design your pages directly rather than picking a theme and then bending it to fit. That’s a different way of working, and it won’t suit everyone. If you want to install something and start writing today, one of the other themes may get you there faster. But if you’d rather have proper control over how the site looks without touching much code, this is the one I’d choose.

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, various layouts, WooCommerce integration, and many other features that 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.

I’d argue that this is currently the best free theme for WordPress. In fact, the free Blocksy theme will likely be more than enough for many WordPress users, and Blocksy Pro is there if you outgrow it. Need I say more?

Neve is a free theme built for speed, and it’s one of the better starting points if you don’t want to spend anything. At the time of writing, it’s on 200,000+ sites, holds a 4.7 out of 5 rating from well over a thousand reviews, and is actively developed. The current version 4 was a substantial rebuild rather than a tidy-up. The honest caveat: the free starter designs are fairly plain, and you’ll likely want the block editor or a page builder alongside it once you get past the basics.

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, with no code required. Kadence Conversions will enable you to create pop-ups and banners, etc., though it isn’t free, so I’d only consider it if you plan 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 blog 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, Thrive Architect (Ad), 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 has updated its business model, so you can now access Thrive’s plugins as part of Thrive Suite.

This involves paying an annual fee (unless you buy the lifetime access). Still, 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 provides its 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, you can get CloudFlare for free as part of your hosting package.

This is the image compressor running on this site. It compresses images as they’re uploaded, so pages stay fast without me having to remember anything. One thing caught me out, though: it compresses PDFs and images, which strips out the tagging that tells a screen reader how to read the file: heading order, language, structure. Nothing looks wrong afterward. Same words, same pages, same links, so every check I’d normally run came back clean while the accessible version I’d just built was quietly gone. If you host a downloadable guide, turn “Optimize PDFs” off before you upload it.

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. Google has also stated that faster sites 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), worldwide.

iThemes Security Pro is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to secure and protect your website. It will help prevent WordPress hacks, security breaches, malware, and more. Securi SiteCheck powers its WordPress malware scan feature. 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, 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. 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 servers to ensure no load is placed on your hosting server. That way, your website will always run at peak 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 robust Web Application Firewall (WAF).

This WordPress plugin does exactly what its name suggests. It limits the number of times someone can attempt to log in to your WordPress admin panel. iThemes Security (Ad) 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.

This is what I use to back up Internet Habits. It handles scheduled backups, restores and migrations (moving a site to a new host or domain), all from one plugin. There’s a free version to start with, and I use the Pro version. It allows you to save your backups to an off-site location, such as Amazon S3, BackBlaze, Dropbox, Google Drive, or pCloud.

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 to safely test your website updates and changes before you make them live.

Kit (formerly 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 Kit 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, Kit has 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.

Kit 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, Kit 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.

Kit’s live chat and email support are 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 Kit 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 (Ad) 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 the email marketing solution for you.

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

MailerLite provides 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.

FluentCRM is the odd one out on this list, in a good way. It isn’t a service you sign up for. It’s a plugin that runs inside your own WordPress site, so your subscriber list lives on your hosting instead of somebody else’s.

It’s what I use for my own email.

The draw is what happens as your list grows. Hosted services tend to charge more with every extra subscriber, so success costs you. FluentCRM runs on an annual licence with no per-subscriber charge, and a growing list doesn’t quietly turn into a growing bill.

You get a visual automation builder, email sequences, tagging and segmentation, a full contact overview, built-in forms, and native integrations with WooCommerce and the main membership and course plugins.

The trade-off is set up. FluentCRM passes your emails to a separate sending service such as Amazon SES or Mailgun rather than sending them itself, so there’s a step to work through before your first campaign goes out. Their FluentSMTP plugin is free and does the connecting.

Priority support is included with the licence, the documentation is thorough, and there’s an active user community if you get stuck.

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 are social sharing buttons for over 30 of the most popular social networks that you can place in multiple places on your blog, style customisation, share counts, social meta tags, click-to-tweet, advanced statistics and several handy add-ons.

Compared 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 at the top and 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 X (formerly 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 excellent segmentation and built-in split testing to help boost your conversions further. I’m happy I found this little gem. Highly recommended!

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

With features similar to those of Thrive Leads, Optin Monster is one of the best lead-generation software available on 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.

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

As with the alternative solutions, you can choose from multiple styles of opt-in forms to deliver high-converting messages. You can also use lead segmentation, deep integration with your email marketing software, and the ability to show your 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 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 are 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, making you curious to find out your results. Interact is a tool for creating online quizzes. You can use it to segment your audience based on how they answer a question or depending on their results.

Interact can also be used to personalise 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 if used correctly, it can be used to grow your number of email subscribers rapidly. 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 who participate, 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 programmes 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 (Ad). You can find more information in the WordPress plugins section further down this page.

This is the best tool available for easily creating high-quality mobile responsive landing pages. With a vast selection of templates proven to convert your viewers into subscribers (or buyers), you can create opt-in, sales, webinars, 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 excellent built-in split testing feature and works with WordPress and non-WordPress sites.

They also have a list-building feature called LeadBoxes that allows you to create pop-ups, 2-step opt-in forms, and exit pops.

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

ClickFunnels is similar to LeadPages in terms of building landing pages. It provides a large selection of templates, a drag-and-drop page editor, and list-building features. It also integrates 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 various sales funnels, including opt-in funnels, sales funnels, webinar funnels, membership sites, and more!

For those of you who 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 provides dozens of conversion-optimised landing page templates. With the drag-and-drop page builder, you can edit these and build pages from scratch. I’ve used this WordPress plugin to build entire websites. You can get access to it as part of Thrive Suite.

Thrive Architect works with any WordPress theme. It’s not limited to Thrive themes (Ad).

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 can’t get your homepage (or any other post or page) to look how 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 as dragging and dropping.

The Beaver Builder page builder (Ad) 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 fantastic. 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 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 builder’s full potential and allows you to design and build high-quality websites without editing complicated code.

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

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

If you use the Amazon affiliate program, AffiliateX 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, you can redirect them to their local Amazon store using link localisation. This way, you won’t miss out on your commission (you need to be a member of each country’s Amazon affiliate program).

There are also eBay and AliExpress integrations, plus a broken link checker to make sure your affiliate links are always active. To see the plugin in action, visit My Bookshelf.

Nearly every recommendation link on this site runs through BetterLinks. Amazon is the obvious exception because their terms don’t allow link cloaking. A few other links point directly to the company page with no affiliate link involved. BetterLinks turns long, ugly affiliate URLs into tidy links on my own domain and lets me do two things: I can see what people actually click, and when a company changes its programme, I update one link instead of hunting through years of articles. The tidiness is the small win. The maintenance is the real one.

If your host runs LiteSpeed, mine does, this is the caching plugin to use, and it’s free. It talks directly to the server in a way the general-purpose caching plugins can’t, which is why I don’t pay for one here. That’s the catch, mind you: on non-LiteSpeed hosting, it loses most of its advantage, and you’d be better off with WP Rocket, which is also featured on this page.

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 detail in my How To Speed Up WordPress Optimization Guide.

This is another plugin that will help improve your WordPress site’s performance. It can concatenate scripts and styles and 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 X (formerly Twitter), look at Better Click To Tweet. This allows you to create a message you’d like others to share using 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.

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

This is an easy-to-use WordPress cache plugin that will improve the performance of your website. It works well with many 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 slowdown.

This is a lightweight competitor of Gravity Forms. Creating a form is easy with the drag-and-drop builder and a vast choice of templates. There are 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. With added functionality, this is more advanced than Contact Form 7 (mentioned above).

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 are so many different styles of tables you can create with this plugin, and it’s optimised for performance, so it’s blazing fast! Highly recommended.

This brilliant, lightweight plugin makes it extremely easy for you to disable things you may not need on your site. No need to play about with complicated code; with a few clicks, you can turn off features that aren’t required that would otherwise slow down your site. I used this WordPress performance plugin extensively in my post, which details how to optimise WordPress for speed.

It is a brilliant plugin that allows you to enable or disable plugins per page. It is convenient if you have plugins that cause website performance issues, but you need to keep them for whatever reason.

If you want an easy way to tidy up ugly affiliate links, track their performance, and manage your links, Pretty Links is what you need. It’s free! They also offer a Pro version (Ad) that adds a lot more functionality.

Want your sidebar widgets to follow your readers down the page as they scroll? This plugin will allow you to do just that by making your widget fixed or “sticky”.

RafflePress is the best WordPress-based contest and giveaway plugin. It helps you create a viral feedback loop by incentivising your visitors to share your giveaways on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and other social media platforms. RafflePress also integrates with most of the popular email marketing platforms.

Grow your email list, followers, and website traffic with viral giveaways and contests in WordPress.

If you prefer a SAAS-based solution, my recommendations are in the Social Sharing & List Building section further up this page.

This plugin will add a countdown timer to your blog to create scarcity and boost conversions for your offers.

This plugin adds a ‘Coming Soon’ or ‘Maintenance’ page to your blog, allowing you to work on your site without anyone seeing it. I used this plugin to display a ‘Coming Soon’ page with an opt-in form on this blog, allowing me to collect leads and build my list before officially launching the site.

If you want to encourage social sharing for your posts, I recommend Shareaholic. This free plugin floats on the side of the screen and follows the reader up or down the page as they scroll. It supports most social networks and allows you to choose which you’d like to be available for your readers to select from.

This plugin emails your blog commenters when someone replies to their comment. This has the potential to attract the original commenter back to your blog.

This is arguably the best free WordPress cache plugin available. It’s not as simple to use as Cache Enabler, but it’s stacked with features. They also have an excellent Pro version (Ad).

This plugin manages your affiliate links. It lets you cloak links and automatically replace keywords in your blog posts with affiliate links. It also works with bbPress (mentioned above), allowing you to monetise your forum with a hands-off approach. I used this for many years, but I’ve since moved to BetterLinks, which does a similar job.

Testimonials boost conversions. Thrive Ovation, part of Thrive Suite, is an all-in-one testimonial management plugin for WordPress. If you find a WordPress, Facebook, or Twitter comment that you could use as a testimonial, this plugin can automatically grab all the important information, such as the name, picture and comment. You can also create dedicated testimonial-gathering posts, pages and forms to gather feedback.

The plugin saves the collected information into your testimonial library, where you can tag them. This lets you quickly filter and find those that fit your needs in seconds.

There’s also a built-in approval system to make sure you have the right to use the testimonials. Plus, a library of templates designed to give your testimonials a trustworthy look.

Have you read Ask by Ryan Levesque (Ad)? If you haven’t and want to take your business to the next level, I suggest you do so. Once you have, you’ll understand why Thrive Quiz Builder is such a powerful tool.

In a nutshell, you find out what your customers want and then deliver it to them.

Do you think it is easier to sell to a customer when you know what they need rather than when you have to guess what they need?

Exactly! Have your customers tell you what they need, and then market the relevant product to them. If they don’t buy, you can ask them why not and use that data to adapt your marketing message to improve future sales.

Check out all the features that Thrive Quiz Builder has to offer and the other plugins you will get access to as part of Thrive Suite.

You’ve undoubtedly seen products and special offers that are only available for a set amount of time. This is known as scarcity. Taking advantage of scarcity and the fear of missing out can increase your marketing success. Thrive Ultimatum makes it easy to add scarcity campaigns to your website. It’d be difficult to summarise all of its features here, so instead, go take a look at everything Thrive Ultimatum has to offer before it’s too late ;-) (Sorry, I couldn’t resist…)

Thrive Ultimatum comes bundled with Thrive Theme’s plugins as part of Thrive Suite.

This is another alternative to extend the WordPress comment system. It’s designed for performance and has many valuable features.

This plugin will help you automatically clean your WordPress database so that it runs more efficiently. I use it in my post, which details step-by-step how to optimise WordPress for performance.

If you’re just getting started and want a simple way to improve your site’s performance, this caching plugin will provide a nice little boost to your blog’s load time.

This is an excellent caching plugin for WordPress blogs. It’s more challenging to set up than WPSuperCache, but I think it’s worth it. It integrates with content delivery networks (CDNs) to improve your site’s loading speed.

This is a newer caching plugin than those previously mentioned. Although it isn’t free, its ease of setup and ability to improve your site’s performance make it worth checking out.

This plugin allows you to redirect your blog readers to another page on your site after they leave a comment for the first time. I take them to this page to encourage further interaction with them. There are a few other handy features, too.

This should be one of the first plugins you install on your WordPress blog. The Yoast team have developed an excellent plugin that will help you optimise your blog’s content. It allows you to add sitemaps, breadcrumbs, social markup, title tags, etc.

In my opinion, this is the best free SEO plugin available. There’s also a Premium Yoast SEO plugin with several extra features.

Want an easy-to-use membership site on your WordPress blog? Look no further than WishList Member. This WordPress plugin has features that include unlimited membership levels, subscription length control, shopping cart integration, pay-per-post, drip-fed content, member management, and much, much more! WishList Member is ideal for your first membership site.

MemberPress hasn’t been around as long as Wishlist Member but offers many similar features and integrations. At the time of writing, MemberPress is the cheaper option. I recommend comparing the features and choosing the one better suited to your requirements.

This easy-to-use WordPress membership plugin is a more robust solution than the previous two options. It’s the most powerful membership plugin I’ve seen, offering a much higher level of functionality than its competition.

The downside is that MemberMouse has a monthly fee, unlike the WishList Member and MemberPress, which only require a one-time payment (unless you want updates and support for more than your first year).

However, I’d like to point out that if you run a successful paid membership site, the cost of your membership software should be covered each month anyway.

If you plan to offer a course within your membership site, you’ll want to check out WP Courseware. This plugin is a WordPress Learning Management System (LMS). It’s easy to use with a simple drag-and-drop editor, integrates with the three membership site solutions mentioned above, and has a boatload of features!

You can create unlimited courses, modules, and lessons, allow your members to track their progress, deliver completion certificates, create surveys and quizzes, etc., etc.

Teachable is a Learning Management System that takes the worry out of the design and technology aspects of an online course platform. It is easy to use. There’s no need to experiment with WordPress plugins to set up your course for your customers.

Simply create your course, upload your content, and you’ll be ready to go. Now, you can concentrate on marketing and selling your course. Teachable has built-in features to help you do just that. This platform is made for entrepreneurs.

Thinkific is a well-rounded platform that is a great alternative to Teachable. If you want more learning features and a way to engage deeply with your students, Thinkific will likely be your better option.

They offer more flexibility when designing the look of your school and have a fantastic support team. They also provide easy-to-follow instructions to help you set up a professional-looking online course quickly. Highly recommended.

A cheaper alternative is worth considering if you want a simple, easy-to-use platform with outstanding customer support.

This tool allows you to create professional lead magnets quickly. You can create eBooks, checklists, resource guides, workbooks, and more in PDF format. Plenty of templates help you get started, as well as an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor.

If you’re stuck for lead magnet ideas, use Beacon to automatically convert your blog posts into a PDF and offer it to your audience for free in exchange for their email. It’s simple, and it works surprisingly well.

This tool is a huge time-saver!

This is an alternative to Beacon.

Designrr can quickly convert your blog posts, podcasts, and videos into a custom eBook (PDF) with just a few clicks. It allows you to export as PDF, Kindle, iBook (epub), and HTML formats and even has a video transcription feature.

It makes repurposing content to generate leads easy and cost-effective.

This is the software I use to write a lot of the content for my websites: sales letters, video scripts, books, emails, and blog posts, including this page.

I can’t describe how much I love this tool. It’s an absolute joy to use.

It appears pretty minimal but has so much functionality. You can use it to keep track of research, which you can view whilst continuing to write, eliminating the need to flick between applications. Maybe I’m easily pleased, but the typewriter scrolling function is one of my favourite features. This lets you fixate your eyes on the line of text you’re working on as it is automatically centred vertically on the screen. No more moving your eyes down until you reach the bottom of the screen for it to jump back up again (like in Microsoft Word).

It has massively improved my writing process, and I’m not even using it to its fullest capabilities yet.

One of my favourite purchases.

Joseph Michael has created a fantastic course teaching the ins and outs of Scrivener. It’s listed in the Courses section below.

A browser extension that checks your spelling and grammar for you. It helps me out a lot more than I like to admit. It’s also available for Windows and Microsoft Office.

I use ProWritingAid to analyse everything I write. It checks spelling and grammar. It has a built-in word explorer and contextual thesaurus to help you find the perfect word. It’ll advise you on overused words, sentence length, writing style, etc. It integrates with Windows, Mac OS, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs and even has a Google Chrome extension.

It also integrates with Scrivener, the software I use to write all my content. Scrivener provides a distraction-free writing platform, and ProWritingAid improves my writing. It’s the perfect combo!

This application is a handy tool for identifying problem sentences. Hemingway App analyses your writing and provides you with a readability score. If your score is too high, your readers may find your writing difficult to read. Not only does it analyse your writing, but it also provides recommendations on how you can improve the readability.

A true time saver. Missinglettr monitors your blog for new posts. Each time you publish a new post, it automatically creates several social media updates that are scheduled to promote your blog post for an entire year. They come pre-filled with images, quotes, hashtags and more. All you have to do is review the suggestions, make any changes you feel are necessary and click approve. Missinglettr will drip-feed the content to your social media accounts over the next year, leaving you to concentrate on the more essential tasks.

Category-based scheduling, which is the part that matters for evergreen content: you set up buckets of posts, and it recycles them on a schedule, rather than making you queue every individual update forever. If your social plan is “keep something ticking over without sitting on it daily”, this is the shape of the tool that does it.

Similar job to SocialBee, slightly different feel. Good bulk scheduling and a workable free tier if you’re only running a couple of accounts. Between the two, it’s genuinely down to which interface you get on with, so try both before you pay for either.

This tool allows you to manage all your social media accounts in one place. It has built-in analytics, a URL shortener, scheduling, and support for numerous networks.

If you use multiple social media platforms, Hootsuite is definitely worth a look.

If you want to engage with all your followers across multiple social media platforms, consider ContentStudio. ContentStudio allows you to schedule social media updates to a predetermined schedule. For example, instead of sending numerous tweets within the 10 minutes you’re on X (formerly Twitter), you can automatically spread these out throughout the day, preventing your followers from being overwhelmed and engaging with those in different time zones.

With this handy tool, you can regularly promote every new blog post and re-promote your most valuable/popular posts to all your social media accounts. It comes with an easy-to-use editorial calendar to simplify the planning and sharing of your blog posts.

CoSchedule not only integrates with social networks but also integrates with Buffer. Can you see the automation possibilities here?

If you like the sound of the social media management tools mentioned above but have a smaller budget, SocialPilot could be just what you’re looking for.

Edgar is similar to the scheduling tools mentioned above but with one added feature that stands out to me. It catalogues your updates into a limitless library you build over time. This library is sorted into your chosen categories, and the updates are published on a schedule you create. This means that instead of constantly scheduling new updates, once Edgar has published every update in a category, it simply pulls more from your library. You will never run out of messages in your queue, helping to free up your valuable time and giving your new followers a chance to see previously missed content.

An extremely powerful app that makes social media management much easier. All your social media messages will be in one place, with the option to tag messages to better filter and deal with your inbox. As you’d expect, you can schedule, queue, and publish messages on most major social networks. There are in-depth analytics to help you monitor and improve your social performance. Plus, if you work as part of a team, several features will save you and your team a lot of time.

Another powerful tool that makes it easier to manage all your social media engagement. Like all the other social media tools I’ve listed, Agora Pulse also works with all the major social networks.

Do you like the sound of social media inbox zero?

This is the tool to help you achieve it. If you work as part of a team, you’ll be able to see completed messages, those that need attention, and who’s assigned to deal with them. You can even create automation rules to make this even easier. If that isn’t enough, their mobile app is excellent for dealing with your social media messages on the move.

Of course, you can schedule, queue, and publish messages to multiple networks. You also have access to excellent monitoring and reports.

Agora Pulse allows you to run contests, quizzes, and promotions. This summary does them no justice. Check out the Agora Pulse website to see just how great this tool really is.

If you share valuable content with your followers hosted on someone else’s website, this tool will add your Call-To-Action at the bottom of the screen. Sniply takes the original content URL and generates a new URL. The new URL will link to the original content but display a Call-To-Action of your choice, an opt-in form, or a link back to your site. It allows you to share great content and drive more traffic to your site. Brilliant!

I use Affinity for anything beyond a quick graphic. It used to be three separate paid apps; as of late 2025, it’s a single free app, which makes it an easy recommendation now. You’ll need a Canva account to use it, and the AI-assisted extras sit behind a paid Canva plan, but the core app isn’t a stripped-back trial; it’s the real thing. Windows and Mac.

When I need a photo I haven’t taken myself, this is one of the places I look to get it. It’s a stock library: photos, illustrations, video, and the thing to understand is that you’re buying a licence to use the image, not the image itself. That distinction decides what you’re allowed to do with it later, so read what your licence actually covers before you build something around a picture.

If you’ve never opened a design tool in your life, start here. Canva hands you templates for social posts, slides, simple videos, and printables, so you begin with something that already looks finished instead of a blank white square. The honest limitation is that template-led design tends to look template-led, and the nicer assets sit behind the paid tier. For a blog that needs a decent featured image twice a week, the free plan does the job, and you can ignore the upsells. I do my own image work in Affinity Photo, so take this as the recommendation for getting started rather than the tool I sit in all day.

This is the one I use for quick, template-led jobs: a social graphic, a simple cover, something that needs to look tidy in five minutes rather than be perfect. It runs in the browser, there’s a free tier, and you don’t need any design skills to get a decent result. It won’t replace a proper editor, and it isn’t trying to.

When I’m on the Mac and want to do something quickly, this is usually what I open. It’s fast, it feels native, and it does most of what the big photo editors do without the weight. Apple bought the team behind it, so it’s now an Apple product and only runs on Mac and iPad. If you’re on Windows, skip straight to Affinity.

Pixlr runs in a browser tab, which is the whole point. Nothing to install, nothing to keep updated, and you can do a quick crop, a background removal, or a general tidy-up on a machine that isn’t even yours. There’s a usable free version alongside the paid plans, so it costs nothing to find out whether it suits you. Two honest limits: it needs a connection, so it’s no help on a train with no signal, and it isn’t where you’d want to do detailed work on a large file. Treat it as the tool you reach for when one image needs sorting in five minutes.

GIMP is the free, open-source answer to “I need proper image editing, but I’m not paying a monthly subscription for it.” It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux; it’s genuinely free rather than free-for-now, and it handles layers, masks, and retouching that a template tool won’t go near. However, there is a catch: the interface takes some getting used to, especially if you’re coming from Photoshop or Canva, so budget an evening of feeling clumsy before you judge it. And if all you ever do is crop and resize, your computer already does that, and you don’t need this at all.

Adobe Express is Adobe’s quick option: social posts, images, short videos, and flyers, without opening anything as heavy as Photoshop. There’s a free tier, so you can try it before committing to anything. The reason to choose it over the obvious alternative is that if you’re already inside Adobe’s world and want your fonts and brand assets to come with you rather than rebuilding them somewhere new. The limitation is the flip side of the selling point, mind you: it’s deliberately the light version, and the moment you want deeper control, you’ll be nudged toward the full subscription. If you’re not already an Adobe household, start elsewhere.

Word Swag does one small job well: you type a line of text, and it turns it into a decent-looking quote graphic, straight from your phone. If you want a social image while the kettle boils, that’s genuinely useful, and it’s far quicker than opening a design tool on a laptop. Two things worth knowing first. Their site only offers iPhone and iPad downloads, so check whether it’s available for your device before you get attached to the idea. And it’s a one-trick app by design, so it sits alongside a proper design tool rather than replacing one.

Placeit is for when you need your image shown on an item: your ebook on a tablet screen, your logo on a t-shirt, or a quick promo video for a launch. You pick a template, drop your artwork in, and download the result. That speed is the appeal, and it’s also the limitation, because everything is template-led, so if you reach for the popular ones, your mockup will look like plenty of other people’s mockups. It earns its place when you need something presentable today, and paying a designer for it would be expensive.

I use this to record and edit my screen capture videos. If screen recording is the job, Camtasia does the whole thing on its own. Anything bigger goes to Final Cut Pro X, further down this section. You can record directly from your computer screen or import video from a camera or other source.

It’s available for both Mac and Windows, and I highly recommend it.

Do you want to capture screenshots or record short videos? SnagIt makes it easy! From the creators of Camtasia…

This is an alternative to Camtasia for Mac users. I haven’t used it myself, as I use Camtasia, but many friends who use Macs say they prefer it.

This is my main video editing software, and where my Camtasia recordings end up when a video needs proper editing. It’s only available on Mac. There’s not a lot else I have to say. I love this program.

For those of you who are Windows users, this is the video editing software I recommend.

You’ll need PowerPoint if you want to create videos or video sales letters that help keep your visitors’ attention for longer. Create a slideshow and then run through it while recording your screen with the likes of Camtasia or ScreenFlow, mentioned above. Finally, add your audio and finishing touches and render the file as an MP4.

If you’re using a Mac, Keynote is Apple’s alternative to PowerPoint.

Want your videos to look more professional instantly? Head over to Splasheo and check out the cool intro, outro, and lower-third animations that can be customised. The owner is Gideon Shalwick, and let’s just say he knows a thing or two about creating videos.

This is an all-in-one option because Wistia will host your videos and supply video marketing tools and analytics. However, if you need lead generation tools, which I highly recommend, you’ll have to pay monthly for this service. Monthly subscriptions can put some people off purchasing, but remember that video hosting is included.

If you simply want a professional-looking, customisable video player that’s compatible with an array of devices and hosts your videos without ads, look no further than Vimeo Pro. It’s a cheaper option than Wistia.

If you have a YouTube channel and you plan to use it for promotional purposes, you need to install TubeBuddy’s FREE browser extension (Ad). It makes optimising your videos and growing your YouTube channel so much easier.

Closed-back studio headphones built for recording and monitoring. The velour ear pads are soft and replaceable, so they stay comfortable over a long session, and a worn pad doesn’t mean a new pair. They’re made in Germany and built to last. The 80 ohm version sits between the 32 ohm and 250 ohm models: a middle ground between everyday and studio use.

A free, open-source audio recording and editing software available for both Windows and Mac.

The industry standard when it comes to audio recording and editing software. It’s extremely powerful.

Mike and Izabela Russell get my highest recommendation if you want a professional audio recording such as a jingle, intro, promo, etc.

Royalty-free music and audio tracks. There’s a huge selection!

This WordPress plugin will allow you to embed your podcast on your blog. It uses a simple interface and provides a nice, clear audio player for your listeners.

This is the best podcast player I’ve come across so far. It has everything you need for an audio player. You can thank Pat Flynn for that. He built it for his own use but decided to share it because he’s that kinda guy. Fusebox is for you if you want a great-looking podcast player that’ll encourage more sharing and traffic.

Media hosting for your podcasts. It doesn’t get much better than this, and Libsyn is reasonably priced.

It’s what I would use for webinars. It offers so many solutions, including Live Webinars, On-Demand Webinars, Automated Webinars, Evergreen Webinars and more.

I know many people who swear by this platform. It’s very easy to use and great for hosting collaborative webinars.

A well-established platform with an excellent reliability track record. However, it lacks marketing features, so that’s worth considering.

It is excellent for marketing, sales, and community-focused webinars.

If you’ve written an e-book or produced a digital product you’d like to sell online, this shopping cart could be for you. E-Junkie is cheap, reliable, and relatively simple to use. It supports checkouts using PayPal, Authorize.net, TrialPay, 2Checkout, and ClickBank. It has an affiliate programme to help boost sales, and it works like a charm.

If you want to sell your products and recruit affiliates, you should probably start with Clickbank. They make starting easy, and their affiliate tracking and payment systems are excellent.

Although JVZoo is newer to the market than ClickBank, it is another popular digital products retailer with a great affiliate programme. It is very popular with the Internet marketing crowd.

I’m pretty sure that everyone has heard of PayPal. They’re an established and trusted online payment processor that has developed one of the easiest and most convenient ways to pay online. For a simple way to accept payments on your website, look no further than PayPal.

An alternative to PayPal with a less complicated fee system. If you want to accept payments from around the world, including recurring billing, I recommend Stripe’s simple interface.

This is a brilliant shopping cart for selling your products online. It provides professionally designed cart templates to help boost sales. There are 1-click upsells, 1-click bump offers, coupons, A/B testing, a funnel builder and an affiliate centre. The list goes on and on. ThriveCart integrates with all the major email marketing platforms, page builders, membership apps, and, of course, PayPal and Stripe. It even takes care of tax and customer receipts. A shopping cart and so much more! Highly recommended.

This is an alternative to ThriveCart. It has very similar features. I recommend you check them out and select the option most suited to your needs (e.g., integrations with other marketing tools) and budget.