WordPress Resources

Hosting, plugins, and resources to build your site

Looking for new plugins and tools to improve your site?

These are some of the best WordPress products around. Even if you're a WordPress veteran, you'll love this guide for finding amazing new products and resources.

Hey! I'm Ben and I'm the founder of Compete Themes. If you have any questions about these resources or WordPress, you can get in touch here.

Hosting

Great hosting can dramatically decrease your load times and hold up during traffic spikes leading to more sales and subscribers.

  • Nexcess logo Go

    Nexcess

    Nexcess offers powerful hosting technology designed for what you need. Compare plans today. Boost speed, security, scalability & support for your site using modern cloud technology. Remote Monitoring. 100% US-Based Support. PCI Compliance Prep.

    $9.50/month Subscription

  • Kinsta logo Go

    Kinsta

    Kinsta provides premium managed hosting for WordPress sites. They have a gorgeous interface, stellar support, and super-fast load times.

    $30/month Subscription

  • Bluehost logo Go

    Bluehost

    Bluehost is affordable and amazingly easy to use. You get a free domain when you signup and they'll auto-install WordPress for you. Check out our step-by-step tutorial to get started.

    $3.95/month Subscription

  • WP Engine logo Go

    WP Engine

    Fast, secure, and reliable WordPress hosting. We use WP Engine and recommend it for any business on the web. Read the full review.

    $29/month Subscription

  • Namecheap logo Go

    Namecheap

    Create and manage a WordPress website in less than 30 seconds with Namecheap's EasyWP hosting.

    $1/month Subscription

Performance

When your site is slow, people leave. Plain and simple. Use these tools to make your site blazing fast, so you can convert leads and increase readership.

Security

New security vulnerabilities are found every day in WordPress products. Maintaining a healthy website requires taking action to secure your site and defend it from malicious attacks.

  • iThemes logo Go

    iThemes Security

    Provides an actionable checklist for securing your site. Great for fixing the low-hanging-fruit security issues.

    Free Plugin

  • Sucuri logo Go

    Sucuri

    Sucuri ensures you’re never the victim of an attack by proactively patching your site and blocking malicious behavior with their firewall.

    $9.99/month Subscription

SEO

Following basic search engine optimization practices will provide you with more traffic and sales from your existing content.

  • Yoast SEO logo Go

    WordPress SEO

    THE SEO plugin for WordPress. Helps optimize title tags, meta descriptions, and many other factors. I use it on every WordPress site I run.

    Free Plugin

  • Mangools logo Go

    Mangools

    Mangools has a suite of beautiful SEO apps for keyword research, SERP analysis, rank tracking, and backlink analysis.

    $29.90/month Subscription

Forms

Every site needs a contact form, but some form plugins can do much more. Forms can be used to handle virtually any kind of user input.

  • WPForms logo Go

    WPForms

    WPForms is an incredibly feature rich and well-designed form plugin. I use this plugin on most sites I build.

    $49 Plugin

  • Gravity Forms logo Go

    Gravity Forms

    Use Gravity Forms for contact forms, testimonials, surveys, payments, anything you can think of it can handle.

    $39 Plugin

  • Simple Basic Contact Form Go

    Simple Basic Contact Form

    Good (free) contact form plugins are hard to find. This is a simple, easy-to-use contact form plugin that just works.

    Free Plugin

Share Buttons

Adding share buttons to your site is one of the easiest ways to increase the reach of your content and build your audience.

Comment Spam

Comment spam is just as annoying as ever. Luckily, there are some pretty incredible products for combatting spam these days.

  • Anti-spam Go

    Anti-spam

    Incredibly effective at blocking bot spam while allowing human comments. You really need to try this plugin to believe it.

    Free Plugin

  • Akismet logo Go

    Akismet

    Reliably blocks bot and manual spam. Great on its own or in conjunction with anti-spam.

    $5/month Subscription

Email Subscriptions

Perhaps you've heard, the money is in the list. Use the following tools to build your email list and automate email delivery.

  • Optin Monster logo Go

    Optin Monster

    Add forms that are designed to convert readers into subscribers with Optin Monster. CRO tools like A/B testing included.

    $49 Plugin

  • MailChimp for WP Go

    MailChimp for WP

    MailChimp for WP has all the right options to easily add stylish signup forms to your site (also has a Pro version).

    Free Plugin

Backups

Don't risk losing your content. Backup your site every single day with one of the awesome solutions below.

  • BackupBuddy Go

    iThemes BackupBuddy

    The WordPress backup plugin that's so easy to use. Protecting 1 million WordPress sites since 2010.

    $80 Plugin

  • BackUpWordPress Go

    BackUpWordPress

    A simple, but flexible plugin for backing up your WordPress site.

    Free Plugin

  • VaultPress logo Go

    VaultPress

    Built by Automatic, the company behind WordPress, VaultPress is an affordable and reliable solution for backing up WordPress.

    $5/month Subscription

Ecommerce

Selling products on your site can be incredibly challenging and frustrating. The ecommerce solutions below are truly amazing and make ecommerce a possibility for everyone.

  • WooCommerce logo Go

    WooCommerce

    Woo Commerce is a great solution for business owners selling physical products via their WordPress site.

    Free Plugin

  • Easy Digital Downloads logo Go

    Easy Digital Downloads

    Easy Digital Downloads allows us to deliver digital goods with ease, create discounts, deliver updates to our customers, and much more.

    Free Plugin

Analytics

Analytics can tell you much more than how many visitors you get each month. These resources will help you get tons of actionable data from your site.

  • Independent Analytics logo Go

    Independent Analytics

    Independent Analytics is a Google Analytics alternative that adds a beautiful, beginner-friendly dashboard right inside your WP admin menu.

    Free Plugin

Video

These plugins and products will help you get the most out of video on your WordPress website.

  • Swarmify logo Go

    Swarmify

    Swarmify SmartVideo is video hosting for businesses, made effortless. Unbranded and lightning-fast, showcase your products/services with instant starting and buffer-free playback on your site designed to help you make more sales, reduce bounce rates, and keep visitors squarely focused on your brand, not someone else’s.

    $29/month Subscription

Sliders

Sliders can be a beautiful way to present images and content. The plugins below can help you implement sliders easily in your site.

  • Meta Slider logo Go

    Meta Slider

    Meta Slider has four amazing sliders built-in and provides a simple, easy to use interface for inserting them (and there is a Pro version).

    Free Plugin

  • Soliloquy logo Go

    Soliloquy

    A professional, responsive solution for adding beautiful sliders to your site.

    $19 Plugin

Galleries

Galleries are an essential design component for any media-based site. Use these plugins to add beautiful, functional galleries to your site.

  • Envira Gallery logo Go

    Envira Gallery

    Makes gallery creation very easy, and creates beautiful, responsive galleries.

    $19 Plugin

  • Jetpack logo Go

    Jetpack

    Jetpack's tile galleries integrate with the default gallery functionality in WordPress and look amazing.

    Free Plugin

Internationalization

These are great tools for translating themes and plugins on your site, and providing translated versions of all your content.

  • Poedit logo Go

    Poedit

    A must-have for translating WordPress. Provides a clean interface for translating phrases in WP themes and plugins.

    Free Desktop Software

  • WPML logo Go

    WPML

    WPML makes it easy to translate your content, and provide easy access to translate versions via a language selection widget.

    $29 Plugin

  • Transposh logo Go

    Transposh

    Transposh is a unique translation plugin that creates automatic translations of your content, and then allows you to edit those translations to improve them.

    Free Plugin

WordPress Blogs

Learn more about WordPress and building an awesome site with these sites.

Some of the links above are affiliate links. Purchasing a product through one of these links provides us with a commission at no additional cost for you. If you want to say “thanks” for using one of our free themes, this is a great way to do so.