Resources
The hosting, plugins, and tools I actually reach for when building and fixing WordPress sites. Every entry says what it is good at and what it costs, so you can pick without reading a sales page first.
Budget shared and cloud hosting running a LiteSpeed stack.
Shared and cloud plans on LiteSpeed with LSCache, which handles caching at the server rather than needing a plugin. Good fit for small sites and staging environments.
Managed cloud hosting on top of DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS or Google Cloud.
You pick the underlying cloud provider and Cloudways manages the server layer, staging, and backups. Sits between cheap shared hosting and fully managed WordPress hosts on both price and control.
Managed WordPress hosting on Google Cloud premium tier.
Fully managed WordPress with staging, edge caching, and per-site isolation. Priced for business sites where downtime costs more than hosting does.
Caching and front-end optimisation plugin.
Page caching, file minification, lazy loading, and critical CSS from one plugin with sensible defaults. The usual first thing to try when a site is slow and the host has no server-level cache.
Image compression and WebP/AVIF conversion.
Compresses the media library in bulk and serves modern formats. Images are the largest slice of most WordPress page weight, so this usually moves Core Web Vitals more than any script tweak.
Script manager for disabling assets per page.
Lets you stop plugins loading their CSS and JS on pages that do not use them. Useful once caching is already in place and the remaining problem is bloat rather than server time.
WordPress SEO plugin covering meta, schema, sitemaps and redirects.
Handles titles, descriptions, structured data, XML sitemaps, and redirects. The free tier covers more than most sites need.
Backlink, keyword and competitor research suite.
Backlink index and keyword data used for planning content and diagnosing ranking drops. Expensive, and mainly worth it if search is a primary acquisition channel.
Desktop crawler for technical SEO audits.
Crawls a site the way a search engine would and surfaces broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles, and missing metadata. The free tier covers most small sites completely.
Firewall, malware scanner and login protection.
Application-level firewall and malware scanning built for WordPress. The free version covers scanning and rate limiting; paid adds real-time rule updates.
Scheduled backups to off-site storage.
Scheduled backups pushed to Google Drive, Dropbox, S3 or similar. A backup stored on the same server as the site is not a backup, which is the point of the off-site destinations.
Visual page builder with theme building and dynamic content.
Drag-and-drop page building plus template control over headers, footers, and archives. Widely used, which means most client sites you inherit will already have it.
Custom field framework for structured content.
Adds structured, editable fields to posts, pages and custom post types so content editors are not formatting inside a WYSIWYG. The backbone of most custom WordPress builds.
Local WordPress development environment.
One-click local WordPress installs with variable PHP versions, SSL, and push/pull to some hosts. Removes the excuse for testing changes on production.
Nothing in this category yet.
