Top Tools to Build a Website With WordPress

on 04 August 2022, by Bogdan, in Blog, WordPress, FREE, Guides

by Bogdan

In this blog post, we’ll cover some Top tools to build a website with WordPress and what to do with them.

The best thing about WordPress is the versatility of the platform. You can build any type of website provided you install the right tools capable of supporting the needs of the website you want to build.

Because WordPress represents the foundation, it doesn’t have the necessary tools to ensure you successfully build a website with it. Fortunately, you can get this functionality from its themes, plugins, and other tools built for this platform. In this post, we’ll discuss some of these tools and how they can help you to build a website with WordPress platform.

We’ll cover in this article (click links below to jump to section):

Primary tools to build your website with WordPress
Top 5 tools to build a website with WordPress
The OceanWP theme
Brizy Builder
UserPro
Sucuri
Simply Static
Conclusion

Primary Tools to Build your WordPress Website

Despite each type of website requiring some specific tools, some general tools cut across a majority of websites built with WordPress. These tools are essential for basic functionality on your website. This includes:

Protecting your website and its content.

Adding contact forms to your site.

Optimizing the speed of WordPress.

Setting up terms and conditions, and so on.

If you’re new to this space, here are some essential plugins to help you build a site with WordPress:

Jetpack

Jetpack is the first plugin installed by most WordPress users. This is because it is a quality solution with a wide variety of uses. It keeps your site secure by protecting it from attacks, improves the performance of your site by leveraging WordPress servers. It also adds social media sharing, checks your content for grammar and spelling mistakes, and so much more

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a very popular plugin: over 50 million WordPress websites have this plugin installed. Whether you have a blog, an e-commerce store, or any other type of website on WordPress, Yoast SEO is guaranteed to help you massively improve your SEO score. A higher ranking means more traffic which could lead to more conversions if other factors remain optimal.

WPForms

The contact page is one of the most important pages on a website. It provides an avenue for your clients to reach out to you for inquiries or concerns, With the WP Forms plugin, you can build user-friendly forms quickly, easily, and conveniently. In addition, it gives you a lot of control over how your contact forms will look.

WP-Optimize

Low-quality hosting aside, WordPress is slightly slower than how most users would want it to be. But this can be easily fixed using the WP-Optimize plugin. WP-Optimize serves to optimize your site’s speed by handling this issue from different angles including caching, compressing images, cleaning up the database, and so on.

WP Auto Terms

Clients today put a lot of value on data privacy. If your site collects user information, they need to be assured that their details will be kept safe. With WP-Auto Terms, you can easily generate the privacy policy page to put your site visitors at ease. It comes with both CCPA and GDPR compliance.

All these tools are available in the plugins section on your WordPress dashboard. You can also get them from the WordPress plugin page: https://wordpress.org/plugins

These basic tools are useful for getting started when building a website with WordPress. However, they can’t give you the specificity you require to build a successful website within your niche or industry. Fortunately, there are some amazing tools that you can install to complement WordPress and add features needed for your website’s success. We’ll discuss these next.

Top 5 Tools to Build a Website with WordPress

1. The OceanWP Theme

The OceanWP theme is a lightweight, powerful, but beginner-friendly theme for WordPress. This theme ensures that you don’t have to build your site’s pages out of nothing by dictating the overall appearance of your website. This includes the layout, color schemes, font families, types, sizes, and so on. OceanWP is a multi-purpose theme, hosting over 220 templates. This means that you can find a template for most industries and niches.

The discussion on the best WordPress theme is usually between OceanWP and Astra. Both themes offer similar features with each having an upper hand in different facets. But, here’s why we think OceanWP edges it.

OceanWP has an excellent free version. OceanWP is essentially a free theme with pro features. With the free version of OceanWP, you can create any type of website including a blog, portfolio, e-commerce, and so on. It gives you a lot of control over how your site will look, with the multiple customization options. You can generate professional pages with the numerous templates available. Although it is free, the premium version unlocks impressive features such as fetching your social media feed to display on your pages, full-screen scrolling, cookie notice, and so much more.
It is easy to use - Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned WordPress expert, you can easily use OceanWP to generate the overall appearance of your website. All you have to do is drag and drop, size and resize.
It has SEO built-in - SEO for generating pages is slightly advanced and requires some technical knowledge of coding. Ocean WP focuses on the parts of a page that are important to search engines and optimizes them. This way, your pages will be ranked highly by search engines, increasing the likelihood of getting more organic traffic.
Fully responsive - OceanWP’s templates have been mobile optimized so that your users will have nearly the same experience irrespective of the device they use.

You can get Ocean WP directly from your WordPress dashboard. All you have to do is go to Appearance>Themes and then search for it. Alternatively, you can also get it from the WordPress plugins page.

2. Brizy Builder

Using your theme and customizer alone to establish your site’s pages is a tedious, time-consuming, and overall unpleasant experience. The customizer is not user-friendly and the theme might not contain the elements specific to your business. To give you more flexibility in customization, you will need a page builder. The best part? You get to do all this by simply dragging and dropping.

Brizy is a unique page builder solution that manages to combine a depth of features in a beginner-friendly interface. With Brizy, you can build a website within minutes without writing a single line of code. You can build a page for any type of industry including health, sports, landing pages, education, etc. With over 100 templates to choose from, you don’t have to worry about starting from scratch. You can make your pages attractive by adding relevant elements and selecting appropriate color schemes. This tool is well equipped to help your site to realize attractive and high-converting pages.

Use blocks to accelerate your page-building process. Instead of adding elements individually, you can simply add a block that covers an entire section of your page, for example, the CTA.

Global styling - create style samples on a single section and apply them throughout your site.

Includes contact form tools - which you can use to collect user information, leads and interact with them.

Support for popular marketing apps - integrate your preferred marketing apps and collect more leads.

Pop-up Builder included - create beautiful interactions that add engagement on your website.

You can get Brizy for free from the official page: https://www.brizy.io/ or the plugins section on your WordPress dashboard.

3. UserPro

If you’re looking to have an online community or offer memberships on your WordPress website, UserPro would be the ideal tool for you. With UserPro, you can easily generate user profiles and member lists on your site. Because members need to sign in to their accounts, you can introduce responsive forms and beautifully-designed front end profiles for them using this plugin.

In any online community forum, users prefer to link their social accounts (twitter, facebook, instagram, etc.). UserPro enables your members to link these accounts to your site, and they can even use them to login. This way, your members can socialize better while accelerating the login and sign up processes.

1. Go to Kinsta’s official website and click on the view plans. Here you’ll see numerous plans ranging from the Starter plan to the Enterprise 4 plan.

Seamless integration with WordPress themes and plugins.
Fully responsive forms with conditional questions.
Elegant user profiles.
Implementation of role-based access to some pages.
Integration with email marketing tools.

UserPro is not free, but paying only $39 for all these offerings seems like a pretty fair deal. You can get it from the CodeCanyon website.

4. Sucuri

Cyberattacks on WordPress are extremely high. According to WordFence, nearly 90,000 attacks per minute are launched on WordPress. That’s not all, WordPress has over 3500 unknown vulnerabilities occurring disproportionately in its themes, plugins, and other WordPress files. For this reason, it is extremely crucial to protect your site personally so that you don’t become a victim of these attacks. What better way than to do this with a tool from a globally recognized authority?

Sucuri by Sucuri Inc. (now owned by GoDaddy) is a security plugin built specifically for WordPress. It is completely free for everyone to use. The Sucuri plugin works by:

Adding a firewall to your site - to block multiple types of attacks including DDoS, malware, XSS, brute force, spam comment, etc.
Auditing your website - it inspects your website for viruses and corrupted files.
Monitoring the integrity of your files - whenever you add a new file on your site, Sucuri scans it to determine if it’s been corrupted.
Remote malware scanning - it can scan for and detect malware remotely.
Other functions include: sending security notifications, conducting post-hack security actions, and blocked list monitoring.

Being a free plugin, you can get it directly from the WordPress dashboard in the plugins section. More advanced features are available in the Premium offering on Sucuri site - https://sucuri.net/

3. Simply Static

Page speed is one of the most important factors to retaining users on your site. WordPress websites are natively dynamic, this means that the code to display these pages is generated as soon as a user requests to view a page. This involves a round trips to the database to generate this content. While this is great for pages that display personalized content or those with regularly updated content, it is not ideal for landing pages and home pages. This is because it adds on the page loading time. This short time might just be enough for site visitors to get impatient and abandon your site.

One way to solve this would be to generate static pages within your dynamic WordPress website using Simply Static. Simply Static is the static site generator that enables you to generate the fastest and most secure version of your static pages. Static pages are alot faste, secure, and more scalable compared to dynamic pages.

With Simply Static, you can convert individual pages like the landing page to enhance its speed, while retaining dynamism in the rest of your website. Apart from generating static pages Simply Static adds the functionality that would not normally be in static pages such as:

Form submissions and comment handling.
Improved search capabilities.
Automating and accelerating the static page development process.

The free and premium versions of Simply Static are available on the Patrick Posner website.

Leverage These Top Tools to Build your Website Today

Although WordPress is a powerful content management system that helps users to bring websites to life code-free, it can’t single handedly fulfill every website’s need. Fortunately, there are tools that have been developed specifically to help users realize high-quality and industry specific websites.

These tools offer a wide range of functionality, including basic functions such as SEO, content optimization, speeding up the website, and so many more. Others are niche-specific, enabling users to develop websites suited for certain businesses, organization, etc. The bottom line is that you will need to put together multiple tools to realize a successful WordPress website.

Article by Bogdan

Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io