Recommendations for DIY
Recommended WordPress Hosting
Cloudways
Needs more technical know-how than shared hosting services but its blazing fast & worth the learning curve involved. If you aren’t very tech savvy, this one isn’t for you sorry
Siteground – Super cheap for & high quality for single websites
One of the biggest & better known hosting companies in the world. They have 24/7 customer care and an easy to use customer panel. I suggest buying a year or longer at this great price, add the malware scan to keep your site safe too. A year of hosting for 1 site + security protection is going to cost you around $100. Bargain!
WPX Hosting- great for multiple websites
Australian data centre, great site speed and excellent customer care. Super friendly and very helpful.
Recommended WordPress Themes
Astra Pro
This is my favourite premium theme coupled with Elementor. I like it for its clean code and its a developers theme so they know what us devs want in our themes.
OceanWP Bundle
Great lightweight theme with excellent woocommerce integration too. If you are new to WordPress I think this has an edge over Astra as its more intuitive
Free Plugins I use regularly so they are tested + don't slow down your build
Duplicate Page – Does exactly it says, duplicates the page or post so you can keep your layouts consistent
Imagify – The best Image Optimiser on the market
Lara’s Google Analytics – Not only does it have a great name, its very good GA plugin + lightweight & easy to use. I prefer to use code for GA but this is a great tool for newbies
Recommended WordPress Plugins (paid)
Elementor Page Builder
The free version of Elementor is great but when you buy Pro you can do so much more. Having used all the well-known Page Builders on the market, Elementor is hands down the best in my opinion and has a Theme called Hello which is a very bare theme that is great if you don’t really want a theme.
Astra Ultimate Add-ons for Elementor
If you have the pro version of Astra you can add this rather than buying Elementor Pro. Its got loads of extra elements
WPRocket
In my opinion the best WordPress caching plugin on the market. If you care about site speed you want to add WPRocket, nothing beats it
LiveChat
Fab chat tool that has a chatbot option too. Excellent to give online help to clients with queries
MalCare
MalCare is a fully automatic WordPress malware scanning and cleaning plugin
DIY SEO
SEMRush
This is one of my favourite tools – I use it daily
SE Ranking
An all-in-one cloud-based SEO and digital marketing tool to run on and off-page website audits, analyze competitors, track rankings, collect and group keywords, monitor backlinks and more.
Simple and Easy to use for SEO Beginners too!