Tools

Here are all of the tools I use or have used building clients’ sites, my business, etc.

It goes without saying that I only ever recommend resources I know and trust, but before I dive in – an important disclosure:

Where possible, I register as an affiliate for the products and services I use & recommend. Many of the links I share on this page are affiliate links, which means if you click these links and make a purchase I may earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you, and in some cases these links may even unlock savings or give you additional bonuses I’ve negotiated.

🚀 Hosting

  • Kinsta: my preferred choice to host my WordPress and WooCommerce sites. They offer free migrations from any host. A downside is that they are slightly more expensive than WP Engine or SiteGround but well worth it!
  • WP Engine: I started using WP Engine for my agency after being fed up with GoDaddy, HostGator, and other budget hosting platforms. WP Engine is a very solid hosting provider and I still have a 15 site plan that I use.

📈 WooCommerce Subscriptions

Here are my list of “go to” plugin extensions for the awesome WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.

🎨 Design

  • InVision: Remember those annoying days of having to send PDFs to your clients for the initial design mockups? Those are long gone, as InVision is the largest and most successful design collaboration tool on the market. They have a free plan and encourage you to check it out.
  • Canva: great for creating thumbnails, resizing images, other light design work, etc
  • Cleanshot: my favorite screenshot and screen recording app. Also can automatically upload your screenshots to the cloud. Available with Setapp subscription.
  • Skitch: another great tool I use to take screenshots.

🛠 Theme & Page Builders

🎉 Referral Program plugins

🔌 WordPress plugins

Free

  • Monster Insights (freemium): I recently started using this plugin after being stubborn that it was for beginners. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I never liked having to analytics.google.com to view my analytics so I rarely did it. Monster Insights free plugin works great and is a must-have plugin if you use Google Analytics on your site.
  • User Switching: makes it easy for you to switch to a customer and shop for them, see what they are seeing on their account page, etc. This is a must-have plugin for anyone using WooCommerce Subscriptions!
  • Advanced Custom Fields
  • Email Log
  • Disable Emails
  • Gravity Forms: still my favorite form plugin! Expensive but worth it especially with how many integrations they have.
  • LearnDash: makes it eazy to build your online course.

⚡Site Speed and Performance

  • WP Rocket: the easiest interface and most straightforward optimization plugin. Yes, it costs some money but is well worth it especially if your client keeps complaining about site speed.

📦 Shipping

  • ShipStation: easy integrate with a shipping provider and automate the fulfillment process. I recommend this if you are currently fulfiilling orders manually and looking for a automated solution. ShipStation also has a free plugin that was built specificaly integrates with WooCommerce.
  • Shipment Tracking: automatically add tracking numbers to orders after they have been shipped. Integrates directly with ShipStation and others.
  • Label Printer: use a label printer to print off shipping labels using ShipStation or your preferred shipping software.

🎯 Other Software

  • Proposify: streamlines the proposal writing process as it provides tools that allow users to create custom-designed, reusable templates so that new proposals can be produced quickly without compromising quality.
  • Quickbooks: the accounting software I have been using for the last 5+ years! Freshbooks and Xero may be tempting to use but go with Quickbooks. Your accountant is most comfortable with Quickbooks too.
  • Make: my automation tool of choice.
  • Help Scout: easy to add a help desk to respond to support requests, add documentation, and more.
  • TaxJar: automate tax calculations on your WooCommerce site and makes it easy when filing taxes every year.
  • SEMRush: solid seo tool.

✅ Chrome Extensions

These are the Chrome Extensions I use on a day-to-day basis to do all my tasks.

  • Grammarly: spell-check tool that also uses AI to improve your writing. They have a great chrome extension and free plan.
  • Wappalyzer: Identifies what technologies are used on each site. This is perfect if you are curious about how a site was built and if it is using WordPress or not.
  • Inbox When Ready: Email is a big distraction. I use Inbox When Ready to trim down the number of times I check my email.
  • Momentum: Cool new tab extension that shows you the time, weather, to-do list, etc.
  • Redirect Path: Helpful if I migrate to a new site and want to make sure redirects are working and not chained.
  • Keywords Everywhere: I do not consider myself an SEO expert. However, I usually am curious about the monthly search volume for any keyword I type in.
  • DataSlayer: Really helpful if a client of yours needs you to debug Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager events firing. DataSlayer adds an additional tab to your browser console to make it easy to see all the events when you are on the site. Enable this Chrome Extension to be viewable in Incognito Mode so you can test without having to constantly clear your cache, cookies, etc.
  • TubeBuddy: used for general YouTube stuff like A/B tests, analytics, and keyword research.

⏳ Productivity Tools

  • Setapp: a bunch of Mac productivity tools and apps for a low monthly cost of $10. Really cool especially when these apps sometimes cost $30 or more in the App Store. I use CleanMyMac, CleanShot X, Paste, Clear VPN, and more.
  • Grammarly: spell-check tool that also uses AI to improve your writing. They have a great chrome extension and free plan.

📋 Desk setup

🎬 YouTube Gear