Recommendations

These companies offer services and products that I have personally used and recommend. There is one affiliate link, clearly marked with an *.

Hosting

WP Engine* – ewww.io is powered by WP Engine, and their performance is worth every penny. This is “managed WordPress hosting” at it’s finest. 20% discount off your first payment if you want to use the link from this page. Otherwise, feel free to pay full price with a direct link.
A2 Hosting – I use them for several sites and this is the fastest shared hosting I’ve seen.

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.
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.
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.
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.
MailChimp – Mailing lists that just work plus automation features that work even when you’re not.
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/

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