WordPress Hosting
- SiteGround – Easy to set up and very affordable! The perfect choice for WordPress beginners. Visit our Start a Website Guide for instructions on getting started with SiteGround.
- WPEngine – Dedicated WordPress hosting with stellar customer support and WordPress-focused features.
Tutorials & Training Resources
- The “How to Start a Website” Guide – Think of us as your new website BFF. Let us walk you through how to (easily!) set up your very own website or blog. We’ll cover everything you need to get started on the right foot.
- WordPress Tutorials – Explore our growing library of helpful, easy to follow WordPress tutorials.
- WP101 – The best WordPress training course out there. If you’re totally lost when it comes to WordPress, this is a great way to learn the basics.
Free Font Resources
- Font Squirrel – Our favorite resource on the web for free commercial use fonts. Faves: Questa Grande and Bebas.
- Lost Type – Lost Type Co-Op is an indie font foundry with beautiful, high-quality typefaces. Faves: Majesti and Klinic Slab.
- Google Fonts – Google Fonts is what we use in our WordPress themes, so you can pretty easily change a font in a theme to a different Google Font! Faves: Raleway and Libre Baskerville.
Premium Stock Photography
- HauteStock – A large library of on-trend, versatile images and videos at your fingertips. Most of our theme demo images are from HauteStock and we can’t recommend them enough! Use code 17THAVENUE for 15% off your subscription.
- Social Squares – Beautiful images perfect for your website or sharing on social media.
- Creative Market – There are so many shops on Creative Market selling beautiful stock photography. Our favorites are Moyo Studio and Floral Deco.
Email & Time Management
- Sortd – Sortd turns your Gmail Inbox into organized lists, making it so much easier to manage.
- Unroll.me – Take back control of your inbox. Combine all of your subscriptions into a single email that you receive once daily. Easily unsubscribe from subscriptions you no longer wish to receive.
- Boomerang – Allows you to schedule emails to be send later. Perfect for when you don’t want your client to know you just emailed them at 2:30 AM.
- Freedom – Freedom blocks websites and apps on your phone or computer for a scheduled amount of time to help you focus and be more productive.
- Focus Booster – Focus Booster provides a Pomodoro Timer and time-tracking software in one.
E-Commerce & Membership
- WooCommerce – Our favorite overall e-commerce plugin. Many of our themes come with built-in WooCommerce integration.
- Easy Digital Downloads – If you exclusively sell digital products, we recommend EDD. We used it for many years on our website and it worked perfectly!
- Restrict Content Pro – RCP is a powerful, easy to use membership plugin for WordPress. Sell subscriptions, exclusive memberships, and lots more.
Backup & Analytics
- UpdraftPlus – UpdraftPlus is a free WordPress backup plugin. It allows you to create complete automatic backups of your WordPress site and store it on the cloud (like Dropbox or Amazon S3) or download it to your computer. This is the backup plugin we use at 17th Avenue.
- BackWPUp – BackWPup is another great option for WordPress backup. It’s super simple to use and allows you to easily set up automatic scheduled backups.
- Google Analytics Dashboard – If you use Google Analytics on your site, this plugin allows you to track your site statistics and analytics right inside your WordPress dashboard.
- WP Statistics – If you don’t use Google Analytics, this plugin is the perfect way to track your site stats sans-GA.
Color Inspiration
- Pinterest – Pinterest is our favorite place to search for color inspiration. There’s so much to find! View our color inspiration board here.
- Colour Lovers – A creative community where people create and share colors, palettes, and patterns. Explore over 4 million user-created color palettes to inspire your ideas.
- 0 to 255 – A useful color tool for finding lighter and darker colors based on any color.
Graphic Design Tools
- Adobe Photoshop – Nothing beats Photoshop for bloggers and business owners. And once you get past the learning curve, it’s easy to use!
- Canva – Canva is a drag-and-drop design tool that lets you effortlessly create beautiful graphics and layouts. You can make social media images, collages for blog posts, business cards, and lots more.
- Pixlr Editor – Think of Pixlr as “Photoshop-lite.” It offers many of the same features, all in a web-based app… for free!
Paid Font Resources
- MyFonts – A great (and very large) resource for quality premium fonts. Faves: Sofia Pro and Bon Vivant Serif.
- Creative Market – Our favorite place to find brush & script fonts. There are so many unique, affordable fonts available on Creative Market from independent font designers. Faves: Paris Script and Moontime.
- Hoefler & Co. – One of the highest quality font foundries out there. Faves: Quarto and Gotham.
Free Stock Photography
- Unsplash – A huge collection of gorgeous images from photographers all over the world. You can find a little bit of everything on Unsplash.
- Magdeleine – We love the modern, ethereal feel of the photography on Magdeleine. Perfect for more edgy applications.
- Pexels – Similar to Unsplash, you can find everything here, from food photography to fashion.
- Burst – A new free stock library by Shopify, geared toward businesses selling products.
Business Management & Productivity
- Evernote – An amazing note-taking app that syncs across multiple devices. Oh, Evernote, how we love thee. It’s by far our favorite and most-used app.
- Dropbox – Dropbox is file sharing and storage software. Great for storing images, sharing images with clients, etc. We love Dropbox!
- Zoho Social – Fabulous social media management software for businesses and bloggers. You can share, schedule posts, and track analytics across all the major social platforms.
- Coffitivity – Coffitivity recreates the ambient sounds of a coffee shop to boost creativity & help you work better. It’s a must-have when working in a quiet room.
Mailing List Services
- FloDesk – The best of the best when it comes to email marketing. FloDesk integrates beautifully with our themes and their drag-and-drop newsletter designer is next level (you can even use your own fonts!). Use our link for 50% off your first year with FloDesk.
- MailChimp – Free for up to 2,000 subscribers, MailChimp is a great option for new bloggers starting their first email list.
- ConvertKit – ConvertKit is geared toward professional bloggers and small businesses. Easily set up automation, content upgrades, and advanced subscriber tagging.
Security & Site Speed
- All In One WP Security – This is our favorite WordPress security plugin & it’s what we personally trust to secure our website against vulnerabilities, hacking, and malware.
- Wordfence – WordFence is the most popular security plugin, and for good reason! It offers a simple interface and it’s not overwhelmingly complicated like other security plugins can be.
- Limit Login Attempts – Limits how many times someone can try to log in. It’ll prevent hackers/bots from trying to ‘guess’ your password and break into your site. If you don’t have any other security plugins installed, at least have this one!
- w3 Total Cache – Improves user experience and SEO on your site by increasing website performance, page load speed, and download times.
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