WordPress Resources, Apps, and Recommended Software

There are a more WordPress hosts out there than you would ever want to attempt to count. These are our recommended favorites.

Flywheel

This hosting company is #1 in our book. Easiest to get up and running, fantastic support, and their dashboard is the best. Free SSL included in all plans!
WPEngine

WPEngine was one of the first WordPress hosts to offer nightly & on-demand backups and a separate staging environment. Great support & free SSL as well.
MonsterMegs

Good shared hosting option if you're looking for something basic. We like that they're independent and have good support.

Where do you go when you need to register a domain for your business? We recommend these registrars.

Namecheap

Very reasonable pricing, nice interface, and excellent customer support. We trust Namecheap. They might have "cheap" in their name, but their quality of service is tops.

Yes, this is the only domain registrar we currently endorse. Stay away from GoDaddy.

Tutorials, classes, videos, and more that are geared to help you learn how to use our favorite content management system.

WP101

Fantastic set of WordPress walkthrough videos that get updated for every new WP release. We subscribe to WP101 for every one of our clients!
Treehouse

In addition to learning the ins and outs of WordPress, a membership to this site will unlock the world of web design, programming, and more. Seriously: better than going to college.

Always be prepared for disaster. Your digital existence could be hanging by a thread.

Backblaze

We've used Backblaze to restore lost files on more than one occasion and they've never let us down. The price is right, too: $5/month per machine for unlimited backups including external drives.

Who is visiting your website? How are they finding it? What are they doing while they are there? These tools can help answer those questions.

Hotjar

This app is so awesome, it's going to freak you out a little bit. We started using it for the heatmap feature which allows you to see what visitors are clicking on. However, the "recordings" feature is going to blow your mind. Amazing app.

Lift Development uses the following pieces of software to do what it is that we do: design and build effective websites.

Coda

Beautiful UI with a ton of features useful for coding and publishing CSS, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, etc. We use it daily.
Affinity Designer

The first graphic design app we've seen that truly competes with Illustrator. Affinity Designer is fast, intuitive, and without the feature bloat that you seem to find in this kind of software.
CodeKit

Most of the websites we build utilize SASS for the stylesheets. CodeKit processes all of that quickly and lets us know if anything is wacky. It does a ton of other things, too, so we should probably look into that.
Polymail

Polymail puts you in charge of your inbox. With each new message, you can easily snooze, delete, archive, mark as spam, and more. Inbox zero IS a reality with this app. Runs on both Mac & iOS.

Resources