The best tools to build powerful websites.

There are thousands of apps and tools out there, but only a small fraction of them are actually worth your time. Here are the tools we’ve personally vetted and use on a day-to-day basis.

Hosting

Spend no time with hosting companies that charge $4 per month. Investing in a quality host is very worthwhile, especially as it forms the basis of both your business and the companies of your clients. Your websites will load quicker, be more dependable, and be safer.

MOST RECOMMENDED

Cloudways

The value of Cloudways is excellent. Performance of Managed WordPress Hosting is available for a small fraction of the price. It is really quick and includes free SSL, staging environments, and automated backups. I'd still suggest Cloudways for the majority of folks despite the support being only average.

MOST RECOMMENDED

namecheap

When it comes to inexpensive domain names, Namecheap is your best bet. For your first year, they offer domains for as low as $0.99 with many of useful add-ons. In addition to domain names, it offers trustworthy hosting for more than 1.5 million websites of various sizes.

BEST FOR AGENCIES

GridPane

If you want to take your hosting to the next level, GridPane is the way to go. It's what I use to host most of my websites now. You pick your server and they add their highly performant stack on top. It's most cost-effective if you manage multiple websites, and want to be more involved in optimizing your servers.

WP Engine

If you host medium-to-enterprise level sites, aren't sensitive about pricing, and would rather not be tinkering around with your servers, check out WP Engine. They're not cheap, but they provide fantastic support and are a good worry-free premium hosting solution.

Website Building

As a web designer, you'll spend thousands of hours inside your theme/page builder of choice. It might be the most important decision you make.
MOST RECOMMENDED

Oxygen

Oxygen is simply the most powerful website builder for WordPress. While it's not as easy to use for novice users or clients who edit their own site, no other builder matches its performance. It has virtually no bloat and let's you create highly-custom dynamic websites. It's what I use for this site and most client sites.

MOST RECOMMENDED

Breakdance

Breakdance Builder is simply the most powerful website builder for WordPress. While it's not as easy to use for novice users or clients who edit their own site, no other builder matches its performance. It has virtually no bloat and let's you create highly-custom dynamic websites. It's what I use for this site and most client sites. Get your money back within 60 days of purchase, no questions asked. It's risk-free! 

Elementor

Elementor is a very good option for the average user. It doesn't offer the same power as Oxygen, but it has plenty of available addons and can be very quick to create standard layouts. I often use Elementor to quickly build landing pages and for sites where the client will be managing the content.

Opt-ins, Funnels, & Checkouts

The most valuable websites are optimized to generate leads and drive conversions. These tools can provide a major ROI boost to almost any website.
MOST RECOMMENDED

ThriveCart

ThriveCart is a great option if you want a checkout system that doesn’t rely on WordPress or WooCommerce. It also comes with upsells, downsells, order bumps, custom checkout forms, and subscriptions, but has a bit less flexibility when it comes to styling. It can currently be purchased for a one-time fee, making the decision virtually a no-brainer.

BEST FOR WOOCOMMERCE

CartFlows

CartFlows is a great way to create beautiful e-commerce funnels on WordPress. It ties into WooCommerce, allowing you to create custom product pages, checkouts, and thank you pages. It also let's you easily create upsells, downsells, order bumps, and custom checkout forms. If you're using WooCommerce, you should get CartFlows.

SureCart

This is a brand new e-commerce platform for WordPress that I'm really excited about. It's headless, meaning it doesn't add any bloat to your website (unlike WooComemrce). Currently it's best suited for digital products and one-off sales.

Convertful

Convertful is a very good popup and opt-in form builder. While most page builders have popups and forms built-in, Convertful's magic sauce is in allowing you to deeply integrate with your email marketing CRM. This lets you show opt-ins based on lists, tags, etc, and create highly targeted calls-to-action.

Essential Plugins

You’ll find these plugins installed on most of my WordPress websites.
MOST RECOMMENDED

WS Form

WS Form is the most powerful form builder I've ever used. It has features that simply aren't available elsewhere, making it almost as much of an app builder as it is a form builder. Their support is also really helpful and responsive. This one is easy to recommend.

Fluent Forms

Fluent Forms is a great all-purpose form builder. It has an easy-to-use interface, plenty of conditional logic built in, and allows you to create conversational forms (think TypeForm). Its founder is active in the WP community, and the plugin is well supported by most page builders.

WP Rocket

Server-level caching is where it's at these days, but WP Rocket has introduced a bunch of speed optimization features that make it essential for any website. Including CSS/JS minification, delay JS execution, video lazy-loading, link preloading, CDN integration and more. It works really well with all the hosts I mentioned above.

ShortPixel

Optimizing the images on your website is super important for page speed and search rankings. ShortPixel is the best plugin I've tested in terms of reducing file size & ease-of-use, and I use it on all the sites I build. It's also great for automatically converting your images to WebP format - reducing file sizes even further.

Design

These amazing design tools can drastically improve your workflow. Levelling up your designs doesn't need to be difficult.
BEST UI KIT

Untitled UI

Untitled UI is easily the best Figma UI kit I've used so far. If you're building a website for a startup, SaaS, or tech company and need a design framework with a ton of different prebuilt layouts - it's pretty much a no brainer.

BrandBird

Not only has BrandBird sped up my content creation process, it's made it a lot more enjoyable. I love being able to take a simple screenshot and make it look amazing in 5 seconds flat. If you want nice visuals for your content or social media posts, it's definitely worth trying out.

Figma

Figma is life. Along with Oxygen, it's easily one of my favorite pieces of software. You’re able to quickly create pixel perfect web & app designs, and it’s much more efficient than using something like Photoshop. All my site builds get designed in Figma first. Their free plan is very generous and 100% usable.

ui8

ui8 is similar to Envato Elements, but has fewer, more premium resources. It has some beautiful modern web/app UI kits, icon sets, mockups, illustrations, and templates. You can choose to buy items individually or get an all-access pass.

Envato Elements

Envato Elements is a handy resource to have for a wide variety of graphical assets. It’s a monthly subscription, but you have unlimited access to all their graphics, videos, stock photos, sound effects, templates, fonts etc.

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