Kori’s Favorite WordPress Resources – Toolbox

May 29, 2019 | Divi Theme, WordPress Wednesday

These are some of Kori Ashton’s favorite WordPress resources and tools. Be sure to research each one. They offer awesome options and some are even free!

Full Transcript:

Hey, y’all, I’m Kori Ashton, and it’s another WordPress Wednesday. Today I wanna share with you a link that I have on my website that is to my toolbox. I work remote a lot of the times, and that’s kind of why you see me in a different background right now. These tools that I’m about to show you are the ways that my team becomes more efficient.

We meet all of our deadlines and were able to communicate across the board, maybe when we’re not in the same building, the same city, or for that matter, even the same country, we can still communicate by using a lot of these resources that I have here. So you can always visit the link. I’ll put that in the description box below, but, for today, check out these resources that I have, I wanna highlight for you.

Yoast

Some of my favorite plugins in WordPress, obviously, Yoast. For those of you who are trying to optimize your WordPress website, and grow the search engine ranking, so it ranks higher and higher, you definitely wanna be using this tool. In my opinion, it’s the best in the market right now, especially, in the budget of free, and I have an entire playlist on how to optimize that plugin. I’ll put that link for you as well, in the description box below.

Form Builders

Gravity Forms, as well, is a huge form builder. I’ve talked recently about another form builder, called WS Form. I’ll put both of those links in the description box below. Be sure to check those out because WS Form even has a free option for you.

Rev Slider

Rev Slider, the slider revolution, is a huge machine. This thing is massive. It allows, not only cool slideshows to happen on your website, but it also allows you to play really cool video on your website. That’s a resource you absolutely wanna use if you want something a little bit more high-tech-looking on your website, little bit more modern-looking.

Themes

The Divi Builder, you guys know me, I mean, I’m about to tell you my favorite themes, Divi, by far. This is actually what I built my website on. So you absolutely wanna look at this awesome page builder called the Divi Builder. This thing is, not only, completely user-friendly, but it doesn’t have all the option overloads that some of the other page builders, unfortunately, come with. This one gives you just enough to do all the fancy things you wanna do, without making it too overboard.

So, those are my two favorite themes, still, to this day, Divi and Avada, both really good options for you, as you’re looking at building out websites.

The major difference here, that I wanna highlight, is that the Divi theme is for an unlimited license. So, you’re able to buy a license that you can put it on as many websites as you want.

Avada is going to be a one-time fee per website that you use it on.

So, if you’re a small agency or freelancer, you might wanna look at using Divi.

Hosting Company

Liquid Web, by far, is a phenomenal hosting company. I’ve just on-boarded a lot of my clients with them, working with them very closely, and figuring out that they actually offer some of the best features that I have seen in a long time, inside of your dashboard, for your WordPress websites.

They have a tool inside there called iSync, and it allows you to quickly see, in one dashboard, every WordPress websites you have, and how many updates are needed, per website, and you just kind of sync into one dashboard, all the views that you need. It’s a really cool tool, and they’ve got it out of the box, inside of their dashboard for you.

Project Management Tools

Now, here’s some of the project management tools, and some of the communication tools I started talking about in the first part of this video.

Zoom, obviously, is a really cool tool, you can use for webinars or one-on-one meetings with clients. You can do a screen share in that moment. You can also request to have access to their computer, and navigate on their computer, if you’re trying to help a client, maybe, learn how to use WordPress.

Basecamp, of course, is a really cool tool for that communication with clients. I highly recommend you have some sort of a tool like that, especially, if you’re a freelancer, or small agency, so that you can have a great tool to have a consistent paper trail of the conversations you have with your clients, and that is a really cool, user-friendly tool.

MailMunch is one of the plugins that I use to capture email leads on my website. It’s a really cool tool. It allows you to have a trigger. So that when people go to leave your website, then it engages the popup. It doesn’t always just open up right in their face every time. It’s kind of annoying. You don’t wanna annoy your visitors.

Slack, of course, is a really cool tool. And, did you know that it actually has a free option for you to go test drive and see if your team likes to communicate inside of that Slack arena? It’s not even just a free trial. There’s a free option for you to use Slack. So, go check that out. It’s a really cool tool that comes with an app. We swear by it, absolutely use it every single day.

Harvest is another tool we use every single day to track our time in each and every project. I have a couple of other videos that I show you how to go a little bit more in detail about how to use that tool. It’s really, really effective, again, if you’re a freelancer, or small agency, keeping track of your hours, so that you’re charging your client appropriately, and you’re tracking your ROI, your margin, basically, as you invest your time, and your effort in the project, building it out, you know that you’ve, either, stayed on track, or, unfortunately, now hourly rate is, the margins are dwindling. That’s not a good thing. So you always need to be tracking your time.

TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy, for those of you who watch my YouTube channel, you’re watching this video right now. This is how I optimize all my YouTube videos. This is how I do it. It’s a really cool tool, and if you’re trying to conquer YouTube, I would highly suggest you taking a look at TubeBuddy.

Learning WordPress

There’s some places online that you can come learn WordPress. WP101, highly recommend his amazing videos that he has there. Really up-to-date, they even have some really cool stuff on Gutenberg, if you’re trying to learn that more.

WP Beginner, again, just a phenomenal resource for you. If you’ve probably done some googling, you’ve already run across, probably, both of those solutions, but I’m just saying, I highly, highly recommend them.

Of course, you can come to any WordCamp possible around the world. There are WordCamps out there where you can go and learn WordPress, in person, and it’s typically a $20 ticket for you to go to something like this.

It’s a really cool resource. In the budget of free, you’ll have a lot of meetup groups around the world where you can go, and check out, again, WordPress meetups, small business meetups, marketing meetups. So, check out that link, inside my toolbox here.

WordPress Community

WP Elevation, again, if you’re a freelancer, and you are looking for a really cool tool, a resource to connect, and learn to build, and grow your business, this is a really cool tool that I’m gonna highly recommend. Click on that, get over there.

Troy Dean and his whole team will just help you phenomenally well learn how to grow your business model, your profit, your process, really cool.

And then, there’s some awesome people here that I follow. I won’t mention all of them ’cause want you to come here and check out all of these.

Check out these books that I’ve got here, y’all.

Some really cool t-shirts, as well.

Some really cool resources, across the board that I hope you love, and, if you have some that you like that I don’t have here on my list, I would love to see your comment in the video below. Comment in the thread. Let us, as a community, see what tools you’re using, what resources you prefer, and how you’re using them. Tell us, give us a case study of how you’re using them.

All right, that’s it for this WordPress Wednesday. I hope y’all are having a great one. I will see y’all next week, bye everyone.