wpteardown.com was created by Elliott Davidson at the start of 2016. I decided to create a WordPress blog off the back of a challenge I set myself and from this, I hope that I can deliver great WordPress tutorials, theme roundups, plugin guides and general WordPress news. I have high hopes for this blog (who knows what the future holds?)

I’m a passionate digital marketer and a developer in the making. Hopefully, with my skills, I will be able to provide you great actionable content. I fell in love with WordPress as I was self-teaching myself on how to develop websites. From this, I learned as much as I could and I’m still learning to this day.

Behind the Scenes of wpteardown.com

I thought you might find it useful if I listed out the tools, services and plugins I use to run WP Tear Down.

WordPress Hosting

I use WP Engine to host our website, this helps us achieve the fast load speeds. With all the mixed reviews out there, I wanted to share my view. It’s simple and reliable hosting to use, it can handle 100’s of users at once while not affecting the load speeds. It has great performance for someone without the technical know-how to set it up and still achieve great results.

Site speed/optimisation

I use Key CDN to reduce my global load times by loading my websites assets via a data centre close to the reader. I love Key CDN because compared to MaxCDN it provides 10 more POPs at less than half the price, free origin shield, HTTP/2, and free SSL with Let’s Encrypt! A small site will cost you less than $3.50 per month. Get $10 in free KeyCDN credits using our link.

WordPress Theme

I use Schema WordPress theme by My Theme Shop for this blog as I think it’s one of the fastest WordPress themes on the market. It is very reasonably priced, putting itself well priced in the premium theme marketplace. As you all guessed, its stand out feature is how quick the theme loads, but that doesn’t restrict the amount of other great features the theme comes packed with. Read my full review of what I think about Schema WordPress theme.

WordPress Plugins

Free

• Disqus Conditional Load: Lazy loads our Disqus comments.
• Pretty Link Lite: Lets us keep track and create our no follow affiliate links.
• WP Shortcode by MyThemeShop: Shortcode to be able to add extra elements to our pages/posts.
• Q2W3 Fixed Widget: Used for our scrolling widget on our sidebar to fix them to that location.
• Yoast SEO: SEO plugin letting us optimise our WordPress site.

Premium

• WP Rocket: Speeds up our site with fast disk WordPress caching and minification of HTML and Javascript.
• Social Warfare: Social sharing plugin you see on our posts.
• WP Review Pro: This adds stars for our reviews and Schema data in SERPs.
• WP Subscribe Pro: Our newsletter subscribe widget and popup.
• Optimus: Optimises our images we upload to WordPress.
• Gonzales: Disable unnecessary scripts to load, giving me that slight edge on load speed.
• WP Coupons: Creates our deals page and randomised coupon widget you see around the site.

Analytics

Google Analytics: Free tracking for all the data surrounding people who visit our site.

Google Webmaster Tools: It allows us to check indexing status and optimise visibility of our website for free.