At Bluebasket Labs, we continuously use WordPress and several plugins to deploy custom e-commerce stores, affiliate marketing websites, deals sites and technology service provider websites for our clients and also for ourselves.

In this article, we would like to share the go-to websites and plugins that will be of use for any WordPress developer to build basic to complex websites.

1. CodeCanyon.net & Theme Forest by Envato:

Whenever our clients need to build a website or a web application, the first thing comes to mind is to choose a design theme, which matches the style of the brand. And next thing is to implement functionalities specific to the needs of a Brand. The third one is to build with high quality and faster time to market, we usually go to this marketplace to search and download themes and various WordPress plugins.

CodeCanyon is the go-to marketplace to purchase safe, licensed WordPress plugins, without the need to consider illegal use.

Our Rating: 8 / 10

 

2. Elementor Pro: (Page Builder & Landing Page Development Plugin, A/B Testing)

To build dynamic faster sites, Elementor Pro provides several addons that will make building pages for a website fast

Whenever we build landing pages for our client websites, there will be many page builder plugins available in the market like brizy, visual composer, Elementor, and Gutenberg. Most of our themes always matches with Elementor pro, The choice for building landing pages is Elementor pro, it has many pre-built templates for wider category of niches that is multi-purpose and has more reusable templates. 

Our Rating: 9 / 10

 

3. Ultimate Affiliate Pro: (Affiliate Marketing Tool)

If you are building a website and to promote your products or services, you may not want to do the hard work every time, instead you might include an affiliate marketing feature in your website, where your affiliates will be promoting your brand or services to boost your business for a newer set of customers.

Our choice of plugin would be Ultimate Affiliate Pro where it has an affiliate dashboard and they have a wide feature set via their add-ons, most importantly multi-level-marketing MLM which is a bigger functionality. And to make payments to affiliates they support Stripe and PayPal, which would be easier to make payouts to affiliates in single click.

Our Rating: 9 / 10

 

4. Restrict Content Pro: (Best Payment Plugin and Membership functionality)

From all other membership plugins in the market, Restrict Content pro is the one which we will recommend for our clients. The initial configuration might take around 20 minutes and stripe webhook settings and api key configuration will take 10 minutes to setup a membership functionality for your website.

Restrict content pro actually restricts the pages and contents for administrators and users. 

Our Rating : 8 / 10

 

5. UpdraftPlus (Backup tool for WordPress site)

While thinking of taking backups for your WordPress site, there are many plugins available in the market but our recommendation would be for you to go with UpdraftPlus plugin where taking incremental daily and weekly backups would be easier, as your site backup will be taken and uploaded to GoogleDrive and other cloud backup solutions. They offer migrator add-on which works via cloud tokens so that your site content and database are in safer hands whenever your site goes off due to a breach, recovering your WordPress site would be in a matter of minutes via UpdraftPlus.

Our Rating : 9 / 10

 

6. Site monitoring ( Which tool or website to monitor downtime?)

When it comes to monitoring your WordPress website, there is a familiar plugin like MainWP where monitoring and backup would be done via MainWP extensions. They’ve got a whole bunch of extensions which is a universal platform for managing your WordPress sites. UptimeRobot extension via Mainwp is free and you can configure it in your UptimeRobot mobile app to monitor uptime and downtime of your WordPress site.

Our choice of recommendation would be Mainwp with Uptimerobot extension for monitoring your site.

Our Rating: 9 / 10

 

7. Site Analytics (Google Analytics)

Google site kit & Google Analytics are the one’s which would alert you, how your site is performing in terms of Analytics. For example take a ecommerce website, it will provide you information where the visitors are turning into customers and provides intellectual insights regarding clicks.

Our Rating: 9 / 10

 

8. Tidio (Chat Widget)

While choosing a chat widget for your WordPress plugins , there are many plugins available in the market. But our recommendation for you would be Tidio.

Tidio has a conversational chat bot, for lead generation and individual support bots for helpdesk and other things. They have multiple features for email marketing triggers via chat flow. It is definitely worth to give a try as it comes free.

Our Rating: 9 / 10

 

9. WooCommerce 

WooCommerce is the easy and universal plugin to create an ecommerce or subscription-based website in the wink of an eye. It offers additional features via add-ons and woo-commerce subscription add on is the one which will turn your website into an subscription website, where you can sell your digital products or services.

Our Rating: 9 / 10

 

10. Pretty Links & Monster Insights (Effective Affiliate Link Tracking)

For tracking ecommerce sales inbound and outbound tracking of links, the Pretty links and Monster insights configured with Google Analytics does the easy job for your WordPress site.

The Monster insights pulls the Google analytics dashboard information and shows it in WordPress backend, and all your ecommerce product paths (links) configured via pretty links can be managed easily for tracking inbound & outbound via Monster insights.

Our Rating: 9 / 10

 

 

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