Over the years there have been a lot of tools developed for developers, and mostly by developers. These developers, in particular, wanted to make things easier for the common folk, and in turn, made it a lot easier for themselves as well. For example, where in the past a developer had to build a website from scratch, a tool like WordPress allows for you to have a huge head start with a solid foundation and lots of tools to make your job easier. Let’s talk about a few tools that can make your development work a lot easier for you.
With WordPress, there are even more tools that you can explore to make your life easier with landing page development, page creation, SEO, e-commerce, and customizations.
Let’s dive into some of those tools now.
Thrive Architect
One of my favorite tools for WordPress is Thrive Architect. Really the whole plethora of tools that come with Thrive Themes. Thrive Architect allows you to build landing pages and pages on your website with simple drag and drop functionality. And while you may have heard of that before, they also offer entirely completed, conversion-optimized templates that you can simply upload with a lick of a button. This saves thousands of dollars or lots of time that will be spent on landing page development. They are very easy to customize whether you’re a developer or not.
Thrive Architect also works well with their other tools that can help you with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). SEtting up email list builders, pop up pages, and even countdowns is a breeze with their toolset. One of the most marketing and design-friendly WordPress tools out there. If you constantly find yourself working with, or building WordPress sites, this is a must-have tool in your toolkit. If you’re a developer in a marketing agency, then this would be a good tool for you.
Cornerstone
While Thrive Architect is great for landing page development, Cornerstone is a tool that shines with overall website development. Especially when paired with X-theme, it allows you to import demo site content directly to your website. They have dozens of demo websites that use this powerful builder and can allow you to borrow the placement and designs to help you build yours. It is also a drag and drop builder but allows you plenty of room to let you add your own raw code. If you want to spruce things up with HTML and CSS you can, and if you don’t, the drag and drop builder is there for you. They also have a great support staff ready to help you out.
SEO by Yoast
If there are websites being built, then there are websites that need SEO. Technical SEO can be a pain to manage, especially if doing everything manually. One break in the code and it can make your website undiscoverable by search engines, or worse, there and not ranking at all because you didn’t optimize your tags properly. While WordPress is already SEO friendly, SEO by Yoast is a must-have.
It allows you to set the Robot.txt index and follow status of every page. This can make it easy for you to exclude pages you don’t want search engines to index in order to avoid keyword cannibalization. You can also set your target keywords and see how your content does with the SEO score that it provides. Lastly, and certainly not least, it lets you set your meta tags and meta descriptions. This is what will show up in the search engines and tell users what the page is about.
WooCommerce
E-commerce can be a tough challenge for any developer. There are a lot of nuances that go into e-commerce when building a website out. There is the front end, the backend, the payment and shipping processors and much, much more. Trying to navigate all of this yourself can be tough. The good news there are tools like WooCommerce out there. They provide the foundation and functionality you need to start way ahead of the curve.
They make it is to set up payment processing, shipping, and even drop shippers if you have one. Uploading products is a breeze and its easily customizable. Another thing Woocomerce makes really easy for you is the tracking of everything in analytics.
The best part is that its completely free to use. You only pay for advanced add on features.
Advanced CSS editor
I’ve never come across a developer that works with WordPress who didn’t want to put their own twist on the website. Some developers, especially those who became developers before the CMS platforms, sometimes get frustrated by the limitations. Well, tools like this make it easy for you to add your own trick of the trade to the WordPress platform. This Advanced CSS Editor allows you to add your own CSS to the website and its pages in order to customize it to your liking.
Why Use WordPress, or Its Tools?
Overtime, WordPress has become one of the most popular website building platforms out there. Because of this, many developers went to work on developing tools for it that are developer-friendly, and this caused a chain reaction. More development tools for the platform meant more developers using it, which also meant more developer developing tools. This is how it became the most powerful platform out there and one that has the most plugins that can turn a WordPress site into any kind of site. Some of the world’s biggest website’s run on WordPress without any issue.
For any aspect of a WordPress site that you can think to change there most like;y exists a plugin or a patch that can make it happen. With WordPress, there really are no limits, which is the biggest downside of some of its competitors out there that are less flexible and less developer-friendly.
Try these tools out for yourself and let us know which ones we have omitted that you use in your WordPress development.