Every website existing on the web should use lot of resources besides human effort. For example, creating images and videos need special tools and investment of money and time from site owner. On this site we use many tools, some we had changed over the period of time but some are being used for years. We want to share such valuable resources so that a new blogger can choose correct resource for building a site.
Choosing Premium Resources
We strongly recommend choosing a good and premium resource for your blog from the start. Otherwise, you will be stuck in the middle spending too much time in migration. Many bloggers also quit at this point as taking a website beyond certain level needs huge effort. Free resources, especially for WordPress, will not come with restrictions and will limit your ability to scale up your site. So, make sure to allocate some budget and go for premium items.
Platforms – WordPress.org, Weebly and Bootstrap
Our core interest is building sites on WordPress, Weebly and Bootstrap platforms. We have a dedicated testing and demo sites in order to create how-to articles and demonstration. All our WordPress content is stored and checked on the local environment using MAMP setup and we also use Local from Flywheel. Learn 500+ WordPress tutorial and 200+ Weebly tutorial to take your site to next level.
SiteGround Cloud Hosting with Email
Recent years, SiteGround had scaled up their services to a new level and you can get a complete package for all your hosting needs. We use SiteGround Cloud Hosting on Google Cloud Platform from 2016 without changing the hosting company. They offer ultrafast PHP, CDN, email, domain with one-click WordPress installation. There are three levels of caching with SG Optimizer and SG Security plugins to boot your site’s speed and security. It will hardly take 30 minutes to purchase a new plan and launch your WordPress site with the free themes and plugins SiteGround offers. The starting price of Cloud plan is $100 and you can autoscale the setup when traffic spikes. You can check our complete review of SiteGround Cloud Hosting to understand better.
GoDaddy Domain
We bought this domain name on GoDaddy a decade back. There are no complains though they discarded their free webmail service. Nowadays, you have plenty of domain name registrars to get a cheap price. Note that SiteGround does not offer a free domain with Cloud hosting plans.
Caching and Optimization
SiteGround comes with in-built caching, however, their SG Optimizer plugin lags many features like removing unused CSS. We use WP Rocket for page level caching, removing unused CSS and other optimizations. For removing scripts and bloat from WordPress, we use Perfmatters. This plugin is useful especially when you have heavy theme and plugins like WooCommerce. You can disable WooCommerce styles and scripts on all blogs posts with Perfmatters to speed up your site.
Note: If you are using multiple optimization plugins, make sure to disable the duplicate features and use them on one place.
Theme and CDN
We use a premium Highend theme for more than 7 years. We are planning to change the theme as this theme is not updated with new features. From speed perspective, you can consider using the free GeneratePress or Astra theme with premium add-on. Cloudflare CDN and WAF works well to speed up and protect this site.
Images & Videos – Techsmith
Snagit is the useful image processing tool from TechSmith having many features. We use it mainly for the following purposes:
- Creating feature images and other images on this site.
- Capture image on the screen or from the web.
- Capture a short video capturing screen activities.
Camtasia is a top video processing tool from TechSmith to create effective videos. You can edit, trim, zoom and do many other simple tricks on the videos to make it more user friendly and sharable. Fuse is a free app from TechSmith used to easily share the photos on the iPhone to Snagit and Camtasia. Since all three tools Snagit, Camtasia and Fuse are from the same company, they work seamlessly without much effort.
Code Editor – Brackets and VSC
Since we need to practice lot of CSS and HTML coding – one of the best editors available WAS Brackets from Adobe. Brackets with extract allows you to integrate the preview of your coding on Chrome browser. And on top of all it’s a free tool!!! Unfortunately, Brackets was discontinued in favor of Visual Studio Code editor from Microsoft. At this point, we use VSC and look for a simple alternative.
FTP – FileZilla for Mac
FileZilla is the life saver for our site to backup and modify the WordPress files easily. We love to try new plugins and site modifications which most of the time will result in white screen of death. It is difficult to troubleshoot from the hosting account and we use FileZilla to reset the files quickly.
Also, from the backup point of view FileZilla on Mac works seamlessly to download the complete site to local environment. If you are new to FTP, learn how to use FileZilla.
Devices for Technology Stuff
Using latest devices is always fun to learn new stuffs. For writing how-to and trouble shooting articles, we had/have the following devices.
- iMac 24 inch desktop
- MacBook Pro Retina
- Huawei MatBook with Windows 11
- Acer TravelMate with Windows 10
- Windows 11 running in iMac with Parallels Desktop for Mac
- We use all popular browsers like Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox.
Other Resources
Besides the resources mentioned above there are additional resources like VPN without which we can’t run this website. These resources are bought from different vendors and evaluated time-to-time for the quality and pricing. At this point of time we use the followings:
- ExpressVPN and Star VPN
- Parallels Desktop for Mac
- Microsoft 365 for Word, Outlook and other apps
- Google AdSense for monetization
- Google Analytics for monitoring traffic
- Semrush for keyword research and tracking
- WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO, Akismet, TablePress, WP Coupons, Ad Inserter, Redirection and Contact Form 7.
Summary
In summary, its not an easy task to run a website both from money and time perspective. This is the reason you could see millions of sites started and dropped off in-between. We wish all the bloggers and webmasters to evaluate the need right at the beginning and choose the required tools from long-term thinking. Also, having right tools will save huge time, which can be spent on the core activity of site creation.