Hosting
I've worked with pretty much every WordPress hosting company there is in the last ten years. My experiences have run the gamut from horribly bad to consistently excellent.
My consistently excellent experiences have been with WPEngine, which I use and recommend today. The hosting is reliable, fast, and the service is helpful. <-- so important, especially if your not super technical, you need that next level service.
I receive a commission if you use this link to sign up for my favorite hosting. If you sign up through the link below, I'm offering one hour of free hosting support to be used within the first year as a thank you.
The average website will run great on the Starter plan.
WordPress Design
Though I do a lot of custom development there are times when a WordPress page builder is a good solution. For small marketing sites it may not be worth the cost to hire a developer and start completely from scratch. Page builders are also a great tool for designers to offer a complete web design package to their clients.
You can create a high quality, mobile friendly, and speedy website with a page builder if your functionality needs aren't complex. My personal favorite is Beaver Builder. It's a lightweight and easy to use visual page builder. It's a builder built by and popular with developers. It's also easier to achieve a good page speed score with this option. Pair this with the Astra theme or Blocksy for the best customization options and site performance.
Even if you're building a custom theme, adding Beaver Builder to the site will give your client more flexible options to build new landing pages without help.
WordPress Optimization
Image Compression
- WP Smush (premium and automatic)
- Tiny PNG (free/manual process)
File Compression/Minification
- Fast Velocity Minify
Caching
- WPRocket
- Cache Enabler
Speed Tests
- Pingdom
- GTMetrix