Wanna know what we use to create our small business and podcast websites? It’s all here. As part of a series on all the technologies, resources and tools we use here at Studio Cotton, I wanted to give you the inside scoop on what’s behind our website scenes.
PS. We’ve included some affiliate links in this article (these are declared in each entry), if you make a purchase via one of these links we will receive a discount and/or kickbacks.
There's a reason why over 800 million websites have been built with WordPress. Our go-to content management system, WordPress is the powerful and flexible foundation to all of our small business and podcast websites.
For online shops, we love WooCommerce for reliability and scalability. This super popular plugin creates everything you need to sell via WordPress, and has a tonne of helpful integrations and tutorials.
Plugins from YITH significantly expand on WooCommerce functionality, with features our clients have loved, like subscriptions and products bundles.
A special shoutout to a plugin we use on every ecommerce website we build. Although we prefer their old version, it's still hugely handy for quickly throwing together creative product collections and completing monotonous data entry.
A literal game changer. Elementor Pro is a visual page builder that adds an intuitive drag-and-drop web design editor to that mega powerful WordPress engine.
If Elementor Pro is our not-so-secret tech for creating a fully-customised, low-maintenance website front end, Crocoblock is our magic ingredient for everything under the hood. With this suite of plugins, we can create pretty much any website feature at a fraction of the cost of a fully custom code build.
JetEngine allows us to create tonnes of content types, dynamic templates, custom taxonomies, all sorts of shortcuts & easy SEO wins, and fancy visibility stuff. It's so dang important to our websites, but always hard to explain why.
One of the simpler Crocoblock plugins, JetSmartFilters is perfect not only for our complex ecommerce websites like Good Fabric and Lauren Aston Designs, but for seamlessly organising blog articles, podcast episodes and so much more.
Every single image on every single website we build passes through TinyPNG, a totally free website that'll compress your pics and keep your website speedy. Find out how we use it with our £3 image optimisation for Macs tutorial.
This ginormous library containing some of the world's most beautiful fonts is available to anyone with an Adobe license, and integrates with our websites in like 3-4 clicks.
An absolute tonne of totally free icons that help us build consistent, clear & useable websites. Available in 7 weights and our favourite SVG format for easy styling.
There are heaps of Elementor widget packs out there, but Qi Addons from Qode Interactive is probably our top pick. With tonnes of creative layouts and design essentials, their free plugin is a lovely addition, especially for service websites.
Oh RankMath, you absolute SEO gem. When it comes to our website creation process, we use RankMath to help build our strong SEO foundation, as well as determining which pages Google should (and shouldn't) include it its search results.
That’s it. If you want to know more about our websites, check out our small business web design service or our podcast web design service. And if you wanna chat tech stacks – DM me on Instagram, I’d love to chat your ear off 😅
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