Have you ever wondered that what powers Squarenoid? What tools do I use to run this blog?
Then you are going to get your answers on this page.
I have been frequently enquired by the newbie bloggers about what tools and resources I use, so I’ve decided to share you all blogging tools through this page.
I’m using the following tools to make my blogging life easier and personally recommending them which will help you to build a successful blog.
Blogging is an evolving platform, so there will always be really efficient applications that I may come across that I believe will be of some value to you, so to that end I will keep updating the list.
I recommend bookmarking it for your reference and convenience.
Here I’m sharing the list of best blogging tools, resources, plugins & themes that I use and I highly recommend these tools for professional blogging. Enjoy!
Best Blogging Tools & Resources
Blogging Platform
Self Hosted WordPress Blog: WordPress powers 27% of all the websites on the Internet, the most popular CMS in the world.
Start your own Self Hosted WordPress Blog today!
Hosting
Bluehost: Bluehost is one of the top web hosting company with hosting over 1.9+ million domains. Officially recommended by WordPress.
Hostgator: Hostgator is a leading provider of web hosting with more than 9,000,000 hosted domains. Squarenoid is hosted on Hostgator (I bought hosting from HostGator with a special offer).
Hostgator has monthly payment plans available whereas Bluehost doesn’t.
Domain Name
Godaddy: With over 17 million customers Godaddy is one of the best internet domain registrars. I’ve bought my domain name (Squarenoid.com) from Godaddy only and alsoI buy all my domains from here only.
Want to get a Domain Name for FREE?
Well then If you buy Hosting for Bluehost using this special link, you’ll get a huge discount on Hosting + Free Domain Name.
WordPress Plugins
- Advanced Access Manager: I use this plugin to manage all users access to my WordPress website.
- Advanced Excerpt: You must have seen Excerpt instead of full post on the blog, that is controlled by advanced excerpt plugin.
- Akismet Anti-Spam: Used by millions, helps to protect my blog from spam comments.
- CloudFlare Flexible SSL: In order to maintain SSL on this blog to flexibly work with my CDN Cloudflare, this plugin is the fix for SSL Redirect Loop for WordPress.
- Easy Google Fonts: The fonts you see in my blog are modified and controlled by Easy Google Fonts.
- Email Subscribers & Newsletters: This plugin I use to store my email subscribers, sending newsletters & automatically notify all my subscribers about new blog posts once it is published.
- Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP): Using this plugin I track all the number of visitors to my website, it also adds a dashboard with all the info directly into your WordPress dashboard.
- Icegram: This plugin helps me to create and manage popups, Optins and CTA’s to increase my email list.
- Imagify: Image compression plugin which reduces image file sizes, improving performance and boosting SEO.
- iThemes Security: An easy to use WordPress security plugin, helps me in making my WordPress blog more secure.
- Jetpack by WordPress.com: Helps me to connect this self-hosted blog with the WordPress.com account. I use this plugin to use the contact form on our Contact us page as it notifies me on the WordPress dashboard itself if someone contacts me.
- Media Rename: This plugin helps me to edit the name of the media file even after the upload in the media library of my blog.
- Members: This plugin is a user and role management plugin. I use this plugin because by default contributor of my blog can’t upload images, this is where this plugin helps and allows the contributors of this website to upload their own images.
- Motopress Content Editor Lite: Drag and drop page builder which integrates beautifully with my current theme Emmet Lite. It has a pro version also.
- OneSignal Push Notifications: This is a free web push notification solution for my blog.
- Preloader: Shows a loading spinner while loading pages instead of showing a blank white page. I love it!
- Pretty Link Lite: I use this plugin to cloak all the affiliate URLs and adding a Nofollow attribute to all the affiliate links.
- Q2W3 Fixed Widget: This plugin comes handy when it comes to fixing a sidebar widget when the page is scrolled down.
- Rainmaker Form: The best ready-made forms plugin, I use this to integrate with Icegram and Email Subscribers & Newsletters plugin.
- Regenerate Thumbnails: This plugin allows you to regenerate all thumbnail sizes after changing the thumbnail sizes.
- Simple Author Box: You’ll see an author box at the end of each post with social links, that is managed by this plugin.
- Social Warfare: Add social sharing links at the top & end of my each and every post in this blog.
- TinyMCE Advanced: This enables more advanced features in the TinyMCE, the visual editor in WordPress which helps me to create beautiful posts.
- Wordfence Security: Antivirus for my WordPress blog, help me securing my blog from malware and vulnerabilities by regularly scanning and automatically notifies whenever caught a malicious code.
- WP Rocket: The best and fastest caching plugin ever, speeds up my website and improves the performance of this blog.
- Yoast SEO: The all in one SEO solution for WordPress, I use it to maintain the SEO of my blog that how my blog looks like on search engines.
Email Software
MailChimp: MailChimp is one of the top email marketing services, it comes with a free plan in which you can have 2,000 email subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month.
Mailerlite: Mailerlite is one of the tough competitors of the other popular email marketing services, with offering a forever free plan which can have 1000 subscribers and can send unlimited emails per month.
Currently, I use Email Subscribers & Newsletters plugin to send newsletters to my email subscribers.
WordPress Theme
Emmet Lite: Emmet Lite by MotoPress is a free multipurpose WordPress theme, currently we are using this theme on Squarenoid.
Genesis Framework: Genesis Framework is the #1 choice and recommended for every blogger out there, it is a framework with it child themes being clean coded, fast, SEO optimized and fully mobile responsive.
Social Media Management Tool
BoardBooster: BoardBooster is a Pinterest tool for bloggers to schedule pins and increase follower and traffic on automation.
TailWind: Tailwind is a Pinterest & Instagram scheduling tool for bloggers.
Both come with a trial version, Go give it a try!
Grammar Checker
Grammarly: My favorite tool for grammar checking which instantly removes any grammatical errors and enhances my writing so that I could serve error free articles to my readers.
Image Editing Tool
Canva: The best simple image design and editing tool, most of my images in this blog are designed using Canva.
SEO Tools
SEMrush: SEMrush is a great tool for keyword researching and finding keyword difficulty, I use to find low competitive keywords for targeted countries. (Start with 30 Day free trial).
KWFinder: Kwfinder is a keyword research and analysis tool, I use this tool to find low competitive keywords with a high volume of searches. You can try KWFinder for free!
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Cloudflare: Cloudflare Offers CDN, DNS, DDoS protection and improves the performance & security of this blog even more.
Affiliate Network
Shareasale: Shareasale is one the most popular affiliate marketing network trusted and used by many bloggers out there including me.
Amazon Associates: The biggest affiliate marketing network by the eCommerce giant Amazon, where you can recommend any kind of products to your users available on Amazon.
To know more about making money through blogging, read How to Make Money Blogging.
That’s it! If you have questions, feel free to contact us using our contact page or our Facebook page.
Last Updated: 24th June 2017 (I update this page regularly) 😀
Thanks!