Some of the links included in this post are from our sponsors. Read our disclosure policy.
Here are the resources we use and have helped other use for starting or improving their blog or website.
Best Tool for Capturing your Blog and Article ideas:
Evernote – you can sync it to your phone and your computer and share it with others. You can create many different categories or notebooks within Evernote to store your ideas.
Website Hosting:
The two best hosting platforms are:
- BlueHost
- GoDaddy we’ve hosted our website with GoDaddy since 2003.
- Cloudways – a new hosting company with flexible plans, good pricing, and the latest innovations.
They both offer 24/7 phone and online support. Their customer services people are very knowledgeable and helpful. We won’t say that it’s always perfect support, but we’d give them both a 95% excellence ranking.
Best Website Platform:
There are so many themes and plugins for you to choose from. And there are so many knowledgeable people who can help you with your site. Years ago we had a Drupal-based site and it was super difficult to find competent people to help support and update our site.
Fastest and Most Flexible Theme
Best Basic information about WordPress
We’ve learned a lot of tips and tricks from WP Beginner – they have videos, courses, and well-written tutorials.
Best YouTube Tool for optimizing videos for search
Our YouTube income and views have really shot up since we started optimizing our videos with TubeBuddy. It’s easy to use and helps our videos get more views.
Best Sources for Stock Photos
Burst (free)
Pixabay (free)
Pexels (free)
FreeImages.com (free)
Unsplash.com (free)
Gratisography.com/ (free)
FreeOldStock (free)
PicJumbo (free)
LifeOfPix (free)
FreeRangeStock (free)
Creative Commons (free)
YayImages (free)
FocusFitness (free)
Low-Cost Stock Photos
DepositPhotos (about $1 per image) (get 10% off with this link)
123RF (about $1 per image)
Image Compression
Optimizing images so they load faster is critical to getting your blog posts to rank for Google Search.
We use the following tools/websites to make our images load faster.
- Google Developers Page Speed Test This page will not only evaluate your page speed, but it will make recommendations on how to improve it. And if your images need to be optimized, with one click of a link, Google will optimize every image that is too large. You’ll receive a download of the images and all you need to do is replace them.
- TinyJpg.com Just drag and drop your images onto the site and they will be smooshed to the right size.
- WpSmush is a WordPress plugin that automatically optimizes images. It works okay, but we still find that Google sees some of these images as needed to be smaller.