These companies offer services and products that I have personally used and recommend.
Hosting
WP Engine* – ewww.io is powered by WP Engine: their performance and support is worth every penny.
WP Development & Maintenance
If you need assistance with custom development or need someone to help you maintain your WordPress site, check out our recommended consultants.
VPS Hosting (unmanaged)
DigitalOcean – All of our servers run on DO droplets, and their reliability is the best I’ve encountered in the last few years.
Plugins
Easy Digital Downloads – Sell digital products with a huge number of extensions for amazing flexibility. Naturally, this is how we sell our services and plugins. We also use their AffiliateWP plugin with several add-ons, and it works very well.
WP Offload Media – Store your images on Amazon S3 or DigitalOcean Spaces. This speeds up your image delivery, reduces the load on your web server, and can save you lots of storage space. Free version also available.
Perfect Images – Generate 2x versions of your images to make your site look fabulous on Retina and High-DPI devices. Free version also available.
FluentCRM – Email marketing and automation, integrates with various WordPress plugins. It’s a self-hosted option that works well with Easy Digital Downloads, and we use it alongside FluentSMTP for the actual email delivery.
WPML – Build multilingual sites with WordPress to reach a global audience.
A good resource for finding the top plugins in various categories is Which-Plugin.com.
CDN
Of course, my first option would be our own Easy IO, but some folks just want a regular CDN. The Easy IO front-end is powered by BunnyCDN, which is super reliable and speedy too.
Easy IO also works with S3 buckets, and I recommend WP Offload Media for getting your media into S3.
Services
BrowserStack -Test your website for cross browser compatibility on real browsers and make sure your visitors are seeing the same thing you do. Instant access to multiple browsers, desktop and mobile.
Fathom* – Privacy-first analytics, where you are the customer and not the product. Simple and easy to use, you don’t even need to mention it in your privacy policy–unless you want to brag about how much you respect your visitors’ privacy!
Helpscout – Treat your customers like people, not numbers, and keep them satisfied. Personal favorite feature is Traffic Cop that keeps you from sending a message if you’ve received another message from the customer while you were typing.
MalCare – Secure your site with a firewall, advanced heuristic scanning, and brute force login protection. Securing your site is not an option, it’s a necessity.
ManageWP – Manage multiple WordPress sites from one place. Flexible pricing lets you choose from standard plugin/theme management, backups (super awesome backup system), performance and security scanning, and more.
NodePing – Monitor all the things, and make sure they stay online. They have a fantastic array of monitors and notifications that you can setup, they are cheap, simple, and have great support.
Postmark – Make sure your transactional emails are delivered. Very useful for things like purchase confirmations, password resets, etc.
Free Images
Some folks, when they get an email about “free image credits” have mistakenly thought that we were offering them free stock photos or something like that. No, we do image compression, not stock photography. However, there are some fantastic folks who are generous enough to share their fine work, and you can search multiple stock photo sites at https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/findaphoto/
*Some links above are affiliate links, which means we earn a commission when you make a purchase. However, this has no influence over the products we recommend.