What tools/services do you use to keep your website fast, secure, and up to date?

Adam Muller
5 replies
I am looking for a tool/service to maintain my WordPress website. Specifically to help with: - speed issues w/ website - fix mobile responsive issues - Help troubleshoot wordpress issue I run into - Maintain plugins up to date - setup cdn, ssl, and keep maintained - etc. What do you use? Any recommendations?

Replies

Alejandro Cantarero
We use: - Lighthouse to monitor for speed and mobile responsiveness issues (free) https://developers.google.com/we... - Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free) for SEO issues (broken links, orphaned pages, large images, etc.) https://www.producthunt.com/post... - CDN: Cloudflare which we've been very happy with. We were able to operate on their free tier for quite a while. https://www.producthunt.com/post... In the past have used AWS cloudfront. AWS option is very cheap if you are already on AWS. Cloudflare has more options and a bit easier to use I think Both deal with auto managing SSL certs so you don't have to worry about that.
Stephane Ibos
We too use Cloudflare for SSL certs management. Very convenient. Re speed and mobile responsiveness, we changed website builder altogether (which might not help you, but just mentioning it). We build our website on weblfow.com. Quite easy to use, and excellent loading scores, mobile loading etc. They really thought this through, and you can load as many images, videos, fonts etc. as you like, without seeing any negative impact on your scores.
Alejandro Cantarero
@stephane_ibos What were you using before you moved to webflow? And how big was the improvement? We've been considering migrating from Squarespace to webflow and wondering if it would be worth the effort.
Stephane Ibos
@alejandro_cantarero1 In my previous company we used Wordpress to host our blog. Although it seemed a good idea (simplicity), it turned out to be quite inflexible and providing bad speed performance overall (per your message). For my current business, we started hosting everything on Wix - for the same reasons of simplicity. The speed performance was a total disaster - mobile and desktop - despite using best practices (limited number of fonts, images, etc.). It was so bad that we were being penalised in search results. So we made a switch to webflow. In my view, totally worth it. Speed performance all around is day and night, with much heavier content. Webflow is actually quite straight forward once you get a grasp of the logics. It's a bit like photoshop for website building. Once you got the gist, it is easy to use, deploys only take a few seconds and there is plenty to build with. I have no affiliation with them, but I highly recommend. One catch though - if you are using something like Cloudflare to manage your SSL certificates (as we do), at times when Webflow renew their own certificates, it can result in an error 404 on your own website. But it is solvable. My take is: if you are not happy with the performances you have at the moment, and you have exhausted all avenues to 'make it better', don't hesitate to invest the time to switch tools. I know that it did really good for us.
Alejandro Cantarero
Thanks @stephane_ibos . We are on Squarespace for the same reason, simplicity. Their desktop speed performance is ok, but on mobile it is really bad. I had already bumped into webflow as an option to get more design control of our site, but hadn't heard it would help with speed also, so that's great to know. Kind of makes it a no-brainer to migrate when we have the time. We also use Cloudflare so thanks for the note there.