The Copyblogger Guide to the Best WordPress Tools: Hosting, Themes, Plugins, SEO, Security, and More

Since 2006, Copyblogger has been your trusted friend for succeeding at digital marketing and sales. We’ve provided guidance to millions of online content creators, digital entrepreneurs, professional marketers, and freelance writers.

We continue to believe WordPress is the best foundation for anyone who wants to build a successful home base for their online presence. It’s certainly worked for us and millions of others.

Copyblogger launched on WordPress. Copyblogger principal Brian Gardner started the entire WordPress premium market back in 2007, and Copyblogger founder Brian Clark popularized the first premium design framework in 2008.

With this foundational expertise, Copyblogger knows WordPress as well as anyone. We know which hosts, themes, and plugins you should trust to power your website — and which ones you shouldn’t.

This Buyer’s Guide answers questions like:

• What are the best options for WordPress hosting?
• Which WordPress themes can you trust?
• What kind of security tools will protect your site?
• Which SEO tools deliver benefits that are worth the price?
• How do I know which plugins provide the best functionality

We’ve distilled our best and most current WordPress recommendations to answer all these questions and more. If you’re using WordPress to build an audience or support a business (or planning to), this is your one-stop-shop for all of the basic tools and services you absolutely must have.

Disclosure: We are committed to researching, testing, and recommending only the best WordPress products and services, based on our direct experience as pioneers in the industry. Copyblogger may receive commissions from purchases made after visiting links within this Buyer’s Guide, at no additional cost to you. Our recommendations are made without regard for whether a commission is offered, or for the amount of commission.

Our Best WordPress Recommendations:

Managed WordPress Hosting

Besides the spark of inspiration that drives you to launch a website in the first place, there is nothing more important and foundational than the hosting provider you choose. A poor choice can doom you to unreliable performance, outlandish overage fees, and unresponsive support when something goes wrong.

But choosing the right managed WordPress hosting will set your site up on the firm foundation it needs to drive the results you’re hoping to achieve.

What should you look for in a host? There are plenty of factors, but five essential ones to consider are:

• Cost: Which host gives you the best value for your budget?
• Support: Who do you feel confident will have your back when something goes wrong? (Because at some point something will go wrong.)
• Traffic and Storage: Who best meets your projected needs for traffic and storage, and what are the overage policies?
• Updates: Which host gives you the most peace of mind when it comes to regularly updating WordPress?
• Extras: What is included that will help you save money on additional services (e.g. security, backups, caching, etc.)

Premium WordPress Themes

If you’re using WordPress, you need a theme. And while there are plenty of options out there for free WordPress themes, there are good reasons why serious WordPress site owners eschew free themes and opt instead for a premium theme for their site.

Here are the five most important reasons why it’s smart to invest in a premium WordPress theme:

• Updates: WordPress is constantly being updated (and many times these updates are critical for security), which means that the themes and plugins you use need to keep up. Premium themes have a far greater likelihood of being updated well into the future, helping to keep your site safe from crashes and invasions.
• Support: You may have questions about how your theme works. You may issues with how your theme interacts with your content and plugins. Having access to experts who can help you is one of the most valuable benefits of paying for a premium theme.
• Quality and Performance: In the vast majority of cases, a premium WordPress theme is going to look nicer, function better, and have more options than free themes. Plus, premium themes tend to have better code quality than free themes, meaning your site will typically load faster and look better on mobile devices.
• Community: You may be looking for suggestions about how to make a certain customization. You may even want someone to bounce strategy ideas off of. Many premium theme frameworks have communities around them that you can join and learn from.
• The ROI is astronomical: All this talk about “paying for” and “investing in” premium themes can make it sound like they cost an arm and a leg. They don’t. In most cases, it’s more like a finger or two. You can typically get a good theme for $100-150, and oftentimes theme companies sell all-inclusive packs for just a few hundred dollars more, giving you a ton of options and flexibility. When you consider the improved experience you’ll deliver to your visitors, plus the peace of mind of having perpetual updates and support, the long-term ROI of the relatively small investment in a premium theme is pretty staggering.

WordPress Website Security

Launching your website live is one thing. But keeping it live, and free from hacks and malware, and protected from DDoS attacks, and off blacklists … well that’s quite another thing.

Which is why standalone website security is worth considering if you simply cannot afford for your website to be at even moderate risk for the many nefarious intrusions and harms that can happen to a live website.

The first step in considering website security is to determine what your host already includes. There is no reason to double-pay for the same coverage. The next step is to assess where your host isn’t covering you, and ensuring that you have the coverage you need for peace of mind. It’s one thing to have daily malware scans on your site; it’s quite another to have a security firm on retainer to respond and remove malware within four hours.

Additionally, you want all (or most) of the following:

• Firewall
• Malware Scans
• Real-Time Threat Detection
• Intrusion Prevention/Detection
• Brute-Force Protection
• DDoS Protection
• Single-port DB access
• Multiple Daily Backups

Domain Names and DNS Hosting

Are you preparing to launch a new website? Then the first thing you will need to do, even before you get your hosting, is to get a domain name and DNS hosting. And while it can sometimes feel like domain names are just a commodity, it makes sense to shop around because prices for the same domain can vary widely from site to site.

Besides price, two other important factors to consider when buying a domain are customer service and user interface. You shouldn’t need to interact with your domain registrar much beyond the initial purchase and setup, but when you do you want it to be a smooth and simple process. Otherwise you’ll get unwanted headaches when you all want to do is make a few simple edits or changes.

There are many, many options to choose from, so we’ve narrowed it down to two options for you.

SEO tools and plugins for WordPress

Once your website is live, secure, and dressed for success, you want as many people in your target audience to visit as possible. And while you will want to leverage your existing network and social media to help drive traffic, few endeavors will yield more reliable long-term results than optimizing your website for search engines.

Which brings us to the standard piece of Copyblogger SEO advice that we have been espousing since this website went live: optimizing for human readers is optimizing for search engines. So make sure that any tool or plugin you use will not detract from the experience you’re delivering to your audience members. If it does, it won’t provide the long-term SEO benefits you desire.

There are three primary benefits you want to gain from any SEO tool:

1. Simple, automated ways to structure the HTML code and meta data of your pages so that search engines clearly understand what your content is about.
2. Insight into the language that your targeted audience members use when searching for the topics that you cover on your website.
3. Analysis of the competitive landscape around the kinds of search terms you want your website to surface for.

Anything beyond that is likely to get you in trouble or be a waste of your money. You don’t need black magic. You don’t need fairy dust. And you don’t need disingenuous promises of quick results. SEO is much more farming than hunting. Which is why optimizing your site for search engines is a fairly straightforward process, but one that you have to be disciplined enough to do right and do well over time. If you understand this, you will succeed. If you don’t, you’ll waste time, money, and opportunity.

Online Course Tools and Plugins for WordPress

You work too hard to waste targeted traffic. That’s why you need to be building an email list. But people aren’t going to sign up for your email list out of the goodness of their hearts; they are going to sign up because you win them over with a valuable offer. This is where online courses can deliver significant value.

You can create an online course that is valuable enough to charge for, but then offer it for free as an opt-in incentive. If you play your cards right, this free course can serve many functions for you:

• It can drive significant list growth.
• It can further establish your authority.
• It can lead people into the next stage of your funnel.

And, of course, you don’t need to limit your thinking to only free courses. Paid online courses are a proven way to leverage your expertise into revenue — even recurring revenue, if your course comes with ongoing education or community components.

But even the most enthusiastic online course endeavors can be derailed by clunky software that is difficult and annoying for you to use, or that renders a course with a poor user interface for students. So you want to choose wisely when installing an online course (or “LMS” for learning management system) plugin or signing up for an all-in-one SaaS tool.

WordPress Membership Plugins

If you are going to host a course on your website, then you’re mostly likely going to want a membership plugin to help you handle some of the logistics. Membership plugins will help you do the following:

• Create different membership levels that dictate access to pages and content on your site
• Drip content based on access level and date of registration
• Host forums for discussion and interaction
• Accept payments
• Create coupons to offer deals and discounts

A good membership plugin with help you handle all of these details and provide you with a basic membership structure for your site. A great membership plugin will do this while being easy and intuitive to set up, and while providing a clear interface for your users.

Other Must-Have
WordPress Plugins

With the links above, you’ll have all of the major bases covered for creating a reliable, successful, even profitable WordPress website. But there will still be some gaps in terms of features and functionality that you should consider filling.

The rest of these plugins will help you complete the picture, so you have a WordPress website that is worthy of your ideas, your effort, and your audience.