Starting and Growing your blog would need you to use at least a few tools and services.
And as your blog grows, you need to use more of these to add more functionalities or improve performance.
On this page, I am listing all the tools/services/products I use for blogging. These are all the blogging tools that I use for my blogs and recommend as well.
I will update this page frequently to show all the current blogging tools I use.
Website Hosting
Currently, I use two website hosting services (as I have multiple blogs).
SiteGround
Siteground is a great website hosting service for beginners and low/mid traffic blogs. They have outstanding support and is easy for a beginner to use. They have three plans and you can use multiple sites on it in two of the three shared hosting plans.
You can read my detailed SiteGround Review here.
SiteGround hosting is what I use for this blog – CraftofBlogging.com
Click here to get SiteGround Hosting
Kinsta
Kinsta is managed WordPress hosting that is meant for high traffic blogs and e-commerce sites. It’s expensive hosting which is geared towards high performance. If you want the best possible WordPress hosting service (and don’t mind paying for it), go for Kinsta.
Kinsta uses Google Cloud infrastructure which allows it to offer amazing performance and high reliability.
You can read my detailed Kinsta Review here.
The best part about Kinsta is their support. It offers 24×7 chat support, which is managed by WordPress experts.
Click here to get Kinsta Hosting
WordPress Plugins
Here I am listing all the WordPress plugins I use and recommend. Since I keep on experimenting with new plugins, I will update this section when I find a plugin worth using.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress.
It’s a free plugin and has 5+ million active installations.
Yoast does the following that will help you do better with SEO:
- Guide you in writing better blog posts by analyzing and suggesting SEO improvements. Note that these are only suggestions and you don’t need to follow each one of them.
- Creates an XML sitemap that you can submit to Google Search Console. This helps in better crawlability of your site by search engines.
- Allows you to no-index tags and categories.
- Creates breadcrumbs
- Counts internal links for all the blog posts. This helps make sure you don’t have orphaned content and your blog posts are well linked.
Click here to download the Yoast SEO plugin.
Yoast also offers a paid version of the plugin, but I don’t find any additional features worth it. All the good features are already available in the free version.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a paid WordPress caching plugin that helps speed up your site and optimize it for high performance.
Although there are many free plugins available, such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache, these can be confusing for an average user.
WP Rocket excels in making it extremely easy for anyone to install and use it.
By default, it automatically applies all the best settings as soon as you activate it. This means that even if you do nothing, it still optimizes your site and makes it fast.
Contrary to other cache plugins that need configuration, WP Rocket recommends going with the default settings for best performance. This makes it worth the money.
Another great thing about WP-Rocket is that it’s not just a caching plugin. It also helps optimize database, enables lazy load, controls Heartbeat API, etc. All these things would otherwise need you to install and activate multiple plugins.
You can read my detailed WP Rocket review here.
Easy Table of Contents
If you write long informational blog posts, having a table of contents will improve the user experience and can also help with search rankings.
Easy Table of Contents is a free WordPress plugin that you can use to easily create a table of contents. You can have a ToC for all the pages/posts or you can use a shortcode to place the table of contents anywhere you like in the blog post.
You can also make some minor design changes to the table of contents section.
By default, using this plugin will create a table of contents using all the headers in the blog post. But you can specify if you want to exclude any headers or want to change the text of any headers in the table of contents.
You can also choose to only include specific headers categories (for example, it can create a table of contents for only H2 or H2 and H3).
You can read my detailed Easy Table of Contents review here.
Click here to get the Easy Table of Contents plugin
Elementor
Elementor is the king in the page-builder category. It’s the best page builder plugin out there and has been getting better every day.
If you’re not aware of what a page-builder plugin is, it’s something that you can use to design your pages or blog posts. For example, you can create nice looking boxes or buttons or lists using these plugins.
Elementor has an easy to use drag and drop interface and is quite intuitive to use.
What makes Elementor stand out is its features to design your theme. For example, you can create a design of how your blog posts should look like, or how your category pages should look like.
I use Elementor on this blog and you can check out the home page, blog posts, category pages, header, and footer (all of which have been designed with Elementor).
So if you don’t like your theme or would like to make changes to your blog design but don’t know CSS or HTML, Elementor can easily do it all.
I use Elementor on almost all my sites and is the only page builder plugin I recommend.
