Like any website, there is always a lot going on behind the scenes to make sure everything works properly for our readers to access where and when they want to. These are some of the key blogging resources we use to run the Beer and Croissants travel website.
Website Hosting
For many years we used Performance Foundry. They were there with us when we were a very new blog, guiding us through so many issues that we didn’t understand. Their hosting service was excellent, providing us with high speed to our readers and minimal downtime and outages. Their help desk support was excellent and they went over and above many of the expectations I had for what a host would provide. Performance Foundry also upgraded our site to https to make it secure and transitioned our site to a new theme to ensure we had no impact on our readers. They provide a high-level, comprehensive hosting package for the price you will pay.
Read more about Performance Foundry here.
Now that we are more advanced in our website lifecycle we have moved to another website host provider who we are also very happy with. WPX Hosting provides an exceptional service with servers in several countries, allowing users to select where they want their website to operate from.
Their customer service is exceptional, with 24/7 online help desk support. We run two websites on WPX. Migrating websites across to WPX is easy and they are always on hand to support and offer advice within the realms of the hosting service. Their website hosting programs are excellent value in terms of bandwidth, database size and pricing components.
Check out the WPX hosting plans here.
If you are an Austrralia website owner with an Australian audience, or an international website owner with an Australian audience, you can’t go past VentraIP for excellent value. Australian owned, this web hosting company offers domain name management, web hosting and email hosting and has exceptional customer service and 24/7 help desk support. Purchasing any of their services can be done easily online. They also support migrations.
Check out the VentraIP plans here.
Website Themes
Themes are such a huge part of a website and yet it’s a decision that is quite often poorly made. More often than not, website themes are chosen based on aesthetics alone. Pretty themes, pretty websites. However, the underlying most important part of a website theme should be functionality and speed. Sometimes the prettiest of themes are the ones that have not been developed properly, causing extensive database bloating with unnecessary code, meaning page speed is impacted. Why is page speed so important? For two reasons. Google won’t reward you for having a slow site and neither will your readers.
For these reasons, we use Genesis parent themes from Studiopress. We have never had an issue using themes from Studiopress. They are easy to set up, to use and to migrate. Plus, once you’ve used a Genesis theme once, you can use any iteration of them without having to retrain yourself.
We use Genesis and Foodie Pro (child theme ) via Studiopress. They are also available through WPEngine.
Social Media
Social media is a necessary part of running a website. To keep on top of it all we use some scheduling tools to help us.
Tailwind is a scheduling tool for Pinterest that we honestly couldn’t do without. It saves us so much time and allows us to grow our traffic through this important social media platform.
Other tools
Writing content is what we do here at Beer and Croissants, but when we write it, we want to make sure people can find it. To help with this, we use software called Keysearch. Keysearch helps us find the best words to use to get our articles to rank. It keeps an eye on all of our keywords too, and allows us to check our rankings for those word. If there was one piece of software we couldn’t do without, it’s this one.