Equip your team with the tools that help you achieve real eCommerce growth. These are all tools that I use daily and recommend to clients, and will scale up from free or nearly free plans.
These are all tools that I use daily and recommend to clients.
They also scale - so you can start most on a free or low-cost plan and then expand as you grow.
Google Cloud Platform
I prefer GCP for cloud hosting.
Cloudways
I use Cloudways for a fully managed hosting solution. They provide Magento 2 with all the fiddly bits put into their admin panel. A very solid option cloud-agnostic solution for hosting - you can spin up an instance on AWS, Azure, GCP and others. Scaling the instance is as simple as a slider.
Cloudflare
I would recommend Cloudflare for any medium traffic and above website. It is a single point of failure, but I think they have more than proved their resilience and transparency when they do have issues. I use Cloudflare for DNS, SSL, Caching, Image Optimisation, Firewall, WAF.
If self-hosting then I use NGINX for the webserver and any caching frontend. I used to think Apache was easier to use, but once you start to use NGINX the config files become much more manageable.
Netdata
I use Netdata for server and infrastructure monitoring. It has agents for almost any OS and is brilliant for providing all the server monitoring data you could need in beautiful graphs and charts.
Magento 2
Magento 2 is a very powerful eCommerce platform. With the Adobe purchase, the future of Magento is uncertain but the open-source community will always keep some version supported (see the Mage One project that is keeping Magento 1 up to date).
Sylius
A headless ecommerce platform for a post Magento/Adobe world.
Shopify
The ecommerce solution with less technical knowledge required.
Ghost
The Ghost blog and CMS platform. Blows WordPress out of the water for ease of use, extensibility, security and general awesomeness. This website is built on a modified version of the default Ghost theme, Casper.
Amasty
Expand the capabilities of your Magento store with Amasty modules. They are rock solid and we have battle tested them on 1000+ transactions a day Magento stores.
Xtento
Xtento make the best import and export modules for Magento.
Unbounce
Landing page builder and platform for creating and optimizing landing pages.
Elasticsearch
Free and open search platform for advanced search functionality.
SendGrid
We use Sendgrid for high volume transactional emails (order confirmation, delivery updates etc).
Formspree
Create forms quickly and easily without janky iframes everywhere.
Codisto
Smarter multichannel for Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Google marketplaces.
Price2Spy
Price monitoring software for competitor price tracking.
Yotpo
eCommerce marketing platform for reviews, SMS marketing, loyalty and referrals.
Fresh Relevance
Fresh Relevance provides machine learning generated product recommendations and the ability to personalise the website based on the customer profile.
Nosto
World's leading e-commerce personalization platform that generates a 10-30% average increase in revenue.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is the best platform for email marketing. The data collected alone is gold dust.
Typeform
Build beautiful, interactive forms and surveys for better user engagement.
OptiMonk
Create high-converting eCommerce popups that don't annoy your visitors.
Fetchify
Postcode lookup and validation for accurate customer data capture.
Metapack
We use Metapack for high volume shipping, automating the creation of shipping labels at the packing station.
Gorgias
Helpdesk designed for e-commerce stores. Provide multichannel customer service from a single app.
tawk.to
100% FREE live chat software to monitor and chat with visitors on your website.
Zendesk
Award-winning customer service software trusted by 200K+ customers.
Zingtree
No-code, easy-to-use interactive decision tree maker for agent scripting and customer guides.
Google Marketing Platform
Unified marketing and analytics platform including Google Analytics.
Google Search Console
Essential tool for monitoring your website's search performance.
Google Data Studio
Create interactive dashboards and beautiful reports for smarter business decisions.
Panintelligence
Panintelligence is an excellent Analytics platform that can be self-hosted. It hooks into SQL databases and can build powerful real-time reports.
InVision
InVision is a great online design tool that I use to create flow diagrams and upload designs from Illustrator for feedback.
ClickUp
Organise and plan. I prefer ClickUp to Asana and Monday for project management.
WebP Converter (FreeConvert)
A free online tool to convert images to webp format for better web performance.
DebugBear
A free tool to check and report on core web vitals and monitor website performance.
web.dev
Test your pages in a lab environment powered by PageSpeed Insights and get tips to improve user experience.