SiteGround is like one of those hole-in-the-wall restaurants that’s both affordable and really freaking good, and it’s the WordPress host we recommend most often to our students.
It’s the best balance we’ve found of quality and price. You can find cheaper hosts, but you can’t find anyone cheap that’s as good as them.
WP Engine has an impeccable reputation for flawless hosting, high performance, great uptime, and a dynamite support team.
If you have a larger budget and want a managed host that can take unlimited traffic, offer perks like site migration and staging, and has experts standing by to help you with pretty much anything you need, WP Engine should be your top choice.
“Ease of use.” That’s ConvertKit’s calling card.
If you want email marketing software that’s intuitive and “just works” so you can spend more time creating and less time messing with software, ConvertKit may be the email marketing tool for you.
Sendinblue focuses on the number of emails you send, not the number of contacts you have. Heck, Sendinblue doesn’t care how many subscribers you have. Have a million. You’re still eligible for their free plan.
And all the key features most people need — marketing automation, advanced segmentation, transactional emails, templates, etc. — are included.
Over a million websites (including Smart Blogger) use OptinMonster to turn their traffic into leads.
From beautiful opt-in forms to A/B testing to page-level targeting, OptinMonster has everything you need to grow your email list.
Elementor lets you create landing pages, design high-quality pop-ups, and customize every aspect of your WordPress site with a slick drag-and-drop editor.
Among its numerous features, you get a dedicated set of 80 design tools that’ll let you fine-tune to your heart’s content.
Elegant Themes prides itself in being an all-in-one WordPress toolkit. When you sign up, you get beautiful themes, sure, but you also gain access to their entire suite of tools. And you can use them on an unlimited number of websites.
As bang-for-your-buck deals go, Elegant Themes is hard to beat.
Almost two million websites use Astra as their WordPress theme. It’s fast, lightweight, and customizable. Not only that, but Astra seamlessly integrates with tools like Elementor and WooCommerce.
Smart Blogger uses it and recommends it.
Grammarly Premium catches advanced grammar and punctuation mistakes, helps you with contextual spelling errors, and provides suggestions for improving sentence structure, word choice, and readability. It even has plagiarism detection.
As good as Grammarly is, many of our readers swear by ProWritingAid, which prides itself on being a grammar checker, style editor, and writing mentor in one package. Smart Blogger readers get a 20% discount.