Welcome To Your WordPress Resource Hub
RESOURCES | TOOLS | TEMPLATES
Be Inspired & Improve Your Business
Having the knowledge, insights, and inspiration of various tools and resources is key to creating a successful website and marketing campaigns. Here’s a detailed list of resources, tools, and templates that we’ve found a lot of value in and will [hopefully] give you the inspiration you need to get started.
What Is WordPress, Why We Recommend It & More
About WordPress - Here’s a quick overview of WordPress from WordPress.org.
Why We Love WordPress - Our clients have tried other platforms, and weren’t happy with their results, and came to us for help. We always recommend WordPress.
Why WordPress Maintenance Is Necessary - Some folks may argue that WordPress is not secure. To those people, we say that’s simply not true. If you have a professional manage the maintenance of your site, there’s a very slim chance anything crazy would ever happen.
WordPress Coaching - We do offer personalized coaching sessions to cover the basics of WordPress to learn more about your site, and to answer any specific questions you may have.
WordPress Glossary - A glossary that lists the most commonly used terms in WordPress.
WP Engine Hosting (for WordPress) - Because of these facts, all of our WordPress sites are hosted on WP Engine. We choose to work with them because their highly managed WordPress web hosting service comes equipped with enterprise-grade capabilities that guarantee superior security, performance, and scalability.
Helpful Resource
What's the Best WordPress Hosting Service?But First, WordPress Plugins
- Yoast SEO (for SEO)
- WP SEO Structured Data Schema (for SEO / Structured Data)
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer (for Page Speed / SEO)
- Beaver Builder (for WordPress Customization)
- Video User Manuals (for Learning)
- VaultPress (for Backups) (If you host with WP Engine, this plugin is not necessary)
- iThemes Security Pro (for Security) (If you host with WP Engine, this plugin is not necessary)
A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. Read More
Resources - SEO
HubSpot's Free On-Demand Webinar, Intro to SEO - Find out more about what SEO is, how it works, differences between on and off-site SEO, why it’s important, and more.
Moz: The Beginner’s Guide to SEO - This guide will run down most of the basics of SEO.
Moz: The Moz Local Learning Center - This resource center can guide you through what it takes to make your site optimized for local search.
11 SEO Red Flags to Watch Our For (This includes a free on-page SEO audit) - It's not easy developing content that follows the rules of SEO, & also making the content useful and holistic. Start with these 11 red flags & free audit!
HubSpot’s Free On-Demand Webinar, The Science of SEO - This is a more of an advanced learning webinar. If you want to learn SEO on a deeper level, this is a webinar for you.
What is SEO? - Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a term that refers to a series of actions and attempts that you can take in order to improve search rankings and drive more traffic to your website.
Resources - Content Marketing & Promotion
Defining Social Media, a 2-Page Guide to Success - There are hundreds of resources out there about social media tips, trends, planning, strategy—you name it. It’s not always easy finding the right information that works best for you and your business or brand. So, we decided we’d try and sum things up for you. Here’s a collection of the most important questions to explore and get you started on crafting a well rounded, holistic social media marketing strategy.
Content Marketing Institute: How to Write a Style Guide for Your Brand - Sometimes branding fails are caused by something getting lost in translation. For example, when Coors translated its slogan, “Turn It Loose,” into Spanish, it used a colloquial term for diarrhea.
Website Content Questionnaire - Your responses will help you to define the initial direction of your website content development, and will help give you and your marketing team a clear understanding of your vision. Your input is the foundation upon which successful brand identities are built. This questionnaire will help you identify and articulate the overall goals for the content of your project.
What Is A Buyer Persona & Why Do I Need One? - This guide will walk you through what a buyer persona is, how to use it, why you need one, and an example of a good persona.
Resources - Design & Technical
Creating A Successful Sales Page Knowledge Share - We developed and frequently use this knowledge sharing guide to create successful sales pages for ourselves and our clients.
CSS Diner - If you’re a CSS guru and want to geek out, play around with this site and see how good you really are!
DNS and MX - Find out if your records are set up the way you intended.
Good UI - If want to know which is better, option A or option B, these guys have probably already tested it. Save time and look through their catalog of recommendations and results. A List Apart - For people who create websites. This is the goto place if you want to find out what the pros are up to.
Grade Your Designer or Developer - Do they have what it takes?
The Ultimate Website Redesign Questionnaire - Narrowing down where to begin your redesign, or determining what changes may need to be made to your website, is now easier than ever. This questionnaire will help you pinpoint where to start and how to approach a redesign of your website.
Website Best Practices Guide - When a person lands on your website you have roughly 8 seconds to make an impression, that’s not much time! This is important because, as human beings, we make roughly 35,000 decisions in one day! Making your website easy to use, gives your visitors more head space to focus on other choices, instead of trying to figure out how to use your website.
Resources - More Leads
Captain Form: 3 Efficient Ways to Use Popup Forms - But how can you make them work for yourself and your audience?
Econsultancy: 49 Email Marketing Tips for Beginners - It’s strange to think that email is still such an important tool for marketers, and in fact business people of all types, when there is so much technology at our fingertips now.
Optinmonster: 6 Reasons Lightbox Popups Capture More Emails - Do you want to increase email signups from your website? Lightbox popups (or “modal” popups) are one of the most effective ways to convert your website visitors into email subscribers and customers.
HubSpot: The Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing [Free Ebook] - This email marketing beginner's guide will take you step-by-step through how to get started with email marketing, starting at the very beginning.
Do Pop Ups Work? - If you visit blogs, especially those of top marketers, you’ll find more and more of them using popups – and for good reason. They work.
Smashing Magazine: Intrusive Interstitials: Guidelines to Avoiding Google’s Penalty - One recent change made this year is the intrusive interstitial update. This algorithm update has one mission: to penalize for intrusive popup ads that affect the mobile user experience. The update rolled out earlier this year. Certain websites saw their mobile rankings in Google lowered.
Neil Patel’s Marketing Automation Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide - You’ve probably heard this term before (marketing automation). Don’t feel bad if you don’t know exactly what it means. 90% of marketers don’t.
Search Engine Land: Google Confirms Rolling Out The Mobile Intrusive Interstitials Penalty - Google has officially confirmed they have begun rolling out the intrusive mobile interstitial penalty. Google did start rolling this out on January 10, 2017. People who had mobile pop-ups did see a fluctuation in traffic.
Resources - Data & Tracking
Moz: The Absolute Beginners Guide to Google Analytics - If you don't know what Google Analytics is, haven't installed it on your website, or have installed it but never look at your data, then this post is for you.
Yoast: Webmaster Tools - These posts describe features and news about webmaster tools programs, and act as a set of tutorials on how to use them at the same time.
Tools & Templates
Browserstack - Testing your website across different browsers and devices is key in making sure every user gets the same, great experience. You can get started with this tool using a Free Trial, then purchase a plan if you so choose (as low as $29 per month).
Chrome Dev Tools - Chrome DevTools is a set of authoring, debugging, and profiling tools built into Google Chrome. These tools may be more for advanced users.
Kissmetrics' 50 Tools to Jumpstart Your Content Marketing Efforts - Here are 50 tools to help bolster your content marketing strategy for the future.
Get a Privacy Policy - It's a practice of being transparent towards your users about what is happening with their personal data that they are providing you with - knowingly and unknowingly.
Google Analytics - Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.
Google Analytics Solutions Gallery - This solutions gallery contains in-product solutions (such as dashboards, custom reports and segments) to deepen your use of Google Analytics and accelerate your learning curve. Whether you’re a newbie or guru, they will help you learn more about your data through the power of Google Analytics.
Google PageSpeed Insights - In addition to GT Metrix, this tool is also useful to figure any technical improvements that may need to be done to your site to improve the page speed.
Google Search Console - Use Search Console to monitor Google Search results data for your properties.
Google Tag Assistant for Chrome - Tag Assistant helps to troubleshoot installation of various Google tags including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and more.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test - Mobile is kind of ruling the world right now in the argument of mobile versus desktop. Having a mobile-friendly, responsive site on mobile is very important. This tool can provide insights into if you do in fact have a mobile-friendly site and more.
Grammarly for Chrome - Grammarly will make sure your messages, documents, and social media posts are clear, mistake-free, and impactful.
GT Metrix - If you want to arm yourself with some good information about the page speed on your site, we suggest using this tool.
MailChimp & Marketing Automation - Personalize your marketing with powerful automations that talk to your customers just like you would. Save time so you can focus on other aspects of your business. MailChimp's marketing automation helps you stay connected to your customers every step of the way—and it's absolutely free.
Moz Local - Check the inter webs for the accuracy of your local listings. If listing data is incorrect or inconsistent between all these data sources, your listing might not show up in the search results. This is the most affordable tool, and is a "no BS" tool. Their support is very helpful.
On-Page SEO Audit - On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page auditing looks at both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.
Merkle SEO robots.txt Testing Tool - Test your robots.txt with this testing tool. Check if a URL is blocked, which statement is blocking it and for which user agent. You can also check if the resources for the page (CSS and JavaScript) are disallowed. If your site is blocked from crawlers, you'll want to fix this right away.
Screaming Frog Broken Link Checker - You can use the Screaming Frog SEO spider for free (and paid) to check for broken links (the http response ‘404 not found error’) on your website.
JitBit SSL Checker - Since Google has announced that going HTTPS gives you a ranking boost, many rushed into buying SSL-certificates and switched to HTTPS. But after enabling SSL, you can use this tool to test your pages for "absolute" URLs that point to unsecure content.
Tracking ROI - We know it’s extremely confusing to track digital marketing ROI, and can be a pain in the…well, you know. Use this template to track your return on investment in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, and other Content Campaigns.
So, What’s Next?
Every single person on our team wants to see your website succeed.
If you need help getting there, we’d love to speak with you!