Skip to content

Home
Ethos
Praise
Training & Facilitation
- LEGO Serious Play Course
- Workshops & Facilitation
Blog
Watch
News
Hire Me

Menu

Home
Ethos
Praise
Training & Facilitation
- LEGO Serious Play Course
- Workshops & Facilitation
Blog
Watch
News
Hire Me

Linkedin-in Envelope

Favorite Resources

Running a small business comes with its challenges and it’s imperative that I find the best products and solutions I can to keep my business thriving and to better provide for my clients. The following are products, services, or solutions that I am truly satisfied with – that have delivered lasting value for myself and/or my clients. While businesses have varied needs, I genuinely feel that these products offer good value. With that said, please also do your own due diligence and look into the refund policies should any of the solutions below prove imperfect for your specific needs. The page will be updated, so please check back periodically to ensure that you do not miss any of the resources that I’ll be featuring.

Disclaimer: I’m an affiliate for some of the resources I share, which means that, at no additional cost to you, I make a small commission if you purchase from my link. I would absolutely not feature anything here that I did not wholeheartedly believe in or derive value from. At times, using my link will also help you get a small discount on your purchase, too.

If you find this helpful, please help spread the word using the social links below:

Facebook

Pinterest

LinkedIn

Email

Twitter

Reddit

WordPress-Based Solutions

Find a reliable website host can be a daunting task and I've spent years exploring the different solutions to finally find what I feel offers the greatest overall value. Flywheel is efficient, well-designed (say goodbye to clunky, outdated cPanel interfaces) and provides stellar and truly personable support. They're constantly improving their solutions and infrastructure and I am thrilled with their Local development solution and its deep integration. While Flywheel is a managed hosting provider (which means you won't be maintaining servers), I find the time it saves me critical in keeping me sane.

Elementor is a versatile, highly intuitive and cutting-edge WordPress page builder. When paired with Astra theme, Elementor provides an absolutely delightful WordPress website & marketing funnel building and editing experience. The Elementor team listens to the community and work hard not only at creating new elements for us to use, but by also offering innovative solutions to enhance our workflows and productivity. Their Pro solution has grown significantly over-time with dozens of useful elements and a large community of raving fans and third party integrations. Elementor is my go-to for modern and well-performing websites.

Get Elementor Pro

SEOPress is an immensely powerful WordPress-driven SEO plugin. It includes features such as: breadcrumbs, schema support, sitemaps, a broken link checker, white labeling, social media sharing features, and more. It's lightweight and won't impact site performance significantly, and also well-designed with a truly intuitive interface and helpful documentation in case you are ever stuck. It's available in 20+ languages, receives frequent updates to, and has been rated highly on the WordPress.org repository. Despite being newer, SEOPress has become my preferred SEO solution.

Malcare is a powerful WordPress security plugin with responsive support. Unlike many security solutions that introduce significant bloat to a website and hinder perofrmance, Malcare runs its website security scans on their own servers, taking the load off your website's server and keeping performance high. It also boasts a powerful firewall to block threats in real-time, as well as a malware removal solution to get sites back up and running quickly. As an agency owner, I'm also thrilled with Malcare's agency features that enable me to manage my client sites from their intuitive dashboard.

Website performance is critical these days with search engines valuing high-performing websites greatly. WP Rocket is a solution I've used for my own and my clients' websites for quite some time now and I'm really delighted with it because of its reliability, prompt support, and intuitive design. WP Rocket's back-end makes a daunting task such as website performance optimization a breeze, and yet it still offers enough advanced features to satisfy experienced users. WP Rocket is a solution I highly recommend which has become my preferred performance optimization solution.

Astra is powerful, Elementor-compatible WordPress theme that leverages high performance with intuitive design and stellar support. The Astra agency licensing comes with additional solutions to take your Astra-driven website to the next level, such as ConvertPro to help you increase on-site conversions, Schema Pro to enhance your website's display in search through the use of schema mark-up, Ultimate Add-ons for Elementor (& another version for Beaver Builder) to add additional block elements to enhance your websites, and much more I've bought the lifetime Agency license and I could not be more satisfied.

Cartflows is a modern Woo-Commerce cart solution that enhances a website's checkout experience and helps create delightful, and conversion-driven e-commerce carts, sales funnels and more. Co-founded by Adam Preiser (WPCrafter) and Sujay Pawar (Brainstorm Force, makers of Astra Theme), Cartflows revolutionizes the WordPress e-commerce experience by making it more streamlined, intuitive, and user friendly. It also adds functionality such as: order bumps, upsells/downsells, cart abandonment, and more.

WP Compress is a newer WordPress image optimization plugin, but one that's won me over because of it's ultra responsive support, delightful back-end, and powerful performance. I use WP Compress to automatically resize and compress images on my client websites and appreciate their agency features that enable me to set monthly allowances per site so that my clients are able to benefit from continued support over time, ensuring that their websites remain high-performing. Of the competitors in the space, I find WP Compress to offer the best user experience and impressive results.

Get WP Compress

Other Business Solutions

Dubsado is a business management solution with truly exemplary support. It offers numerous integrations, communication features, automations, reporting, and more. My absolute favorite feature of Dubsado is the client portal I'm able to customize for each client. This portal helps me organize the on-boarding tasks and paperwork related to each project. Dubsado's powerful forms enable me to create detailed, customized forms to capture clients' inspiration, content and more which is easily accessible to us both in their portal (along with contracts & more). I've been using Dubsado since it's earlier stages and I'm thoroughly impressed with their team and solutions.

ProWritingAid is a robust alternative to Grammarly that I've been using for a couple of years. ProWritingAid advertises that they offer grammar checker, style editor, and writing mentor in one package and it's quite accurate. I find their writing and editing solution to be extremely comprehensive: with over 20 reports (such as style, summary, overused, cliches, repeats, alliteration, pronouns, transitions, etc. to name a few). Each report offers deep insights and powerful suggestions to enhance your writing. The web editor is fantastic and the solution offers support for both Windows and Mac systems, as well as helpful integrations such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Chrome & more. I gamify my experience by trying to beat my writing score upon each use! While not the most well-advertised editing solution, I find it to be the absolute best.

Get ProWritingAid

Your brand deserves to shine, so I’ve built a solution that will help you create a powerful and robust bio for Instagram and other social channels. If you already use WordPress, you won’t need to purchase additional hosting for your bio, and you can customize it to your heart’s content, giving you far greater flexibility than other solutions that come with a monthly subscription fee. PressBio leverages Elementor page builder to help you build a powerful social bio/landing page to help you generate leads, increase conversions and showcase your business' products or services. Not too tech savvy? PressBio will help you get up and running quickly with its tutorial and templates.

AppSumo is a popular website that features deals on mostly new (but also, sometimes established) app developers. I've been purchasing deals from AppSumo for years and have found immense value in many of the solutions I've bought. Being an early adopter has its perks, too, as I'm able to sometimes influence the direction an app is going as many founders favor insights from the AppSumo user base. With that said, there are some risks when purchasing deals from AppSumo as not all start-ups make it in the long run. Depending on the solution, I sometimes will test and use it only internally until I trust that the product will remain viable. Still, I've gotten immense value from it over the years and would recommend AppSumo provided you're aware of the risks. (They also offer a generous 60-day refund policy which helps.)

Online Learning

Coursera is a powerful online learning platform and my preferred resource for affordable high quality education. With courses taught by professors at reputable universities, Coursera offers a powerful learning experience for those who seek to learn at their own pace remotely. Personally, I've taken the UX Research & Design Specialization offered through the University of Michigan and found it quite insightful. I've taken the initial five courses and I'm now in the Capstone course which I hope to finish in the near future. Once completed, I'll receive my certificate. I chose Coursera because of its quality of instruction, flexibility and cost and personally found it to offer greater value than a bootcamp-style course for my needs. A lifelong learner, I'll be taking courses to expand my knowledge and skills often. Get 50% off a course or your first month of a specialization using my link.

Skillshare is a quite different from Coursera but also a powerful place to gain new creative skills. Unlike Coursera, anyone can teach on this platform, so the quality can vary a bit, although I was thrilled to find a large number of high quality courses and tutorials related to my interests. Similarly to Coursera, courses end with a project that ties together the skills you've obtained throughout the course as well as a project gallery where you're able to view your classmates' work. I personally chose Skillshare over other platforms or even YouTube as I found the quality and course selection was higher and worth its annual cost (which I found to be quite reasonable at $99 at the time of this writing) in creative niches. Want to see if Skillshare is right for your needs? My link will grant you a 2 month free subscription to their Premium service which I'm a subscriber of.

Lifestyle

At first, I hesitated adding this section to this website but I then I thought about the value these sustainable shoes have brought to my life and business endeavors. They're polished, yet extremely comfortable and perfect for meetings and travel. They're made from a seamless mesh made from recycled water bottles, so I appreciate that they're sustainable while their flexibility helps them fit like a glove. While they may seem a bit pricey, I've found them to be quite durable and love the fact that they come out of the washer looking like new! (Pro tip: Machine wash with cold water on a gentle cycle and let them air dry. The dryer can shrink your shoes). These are absolutely my favorite shoes for a totally comfortable yet sophisticated look and I highly recommend them. Please note: Rothys tend to run a bit small, so I generally advise sizing up half a size from your usual size. All feet vary though so no promises. If you have doubts, please read the reviews and contact with support. Use my link to save $20 off your first pair.

Allbirds are another sustainable shoe brand that I adore. Most of their shoes are more casual, although their Breezer style is a ballet shoe that works well for professional settings. Like Rothy's, Allbirds uses plastic bottles, although for its laces and not its shoes. The shoes are made from wool or tree fibers, and there are several styles in each: Runners (the most athletic look), to Loungers which are slip-ons, Breezers (ballet flats), Skippers sneakers, Toppers (high tops), and Runner-ups (a high top Runner hybrid). For those living in rainy or snowy regions, their new Mizzles are treated to keep your feet dry and warm. I'm really impressed with allbirds' founders stance on sustainability and appreciate that allbirds is a certified B corporation. Unfortunately, I have yet to see allbirds offer any sale or promo but their shoes are well-made and worth the investment. Like Rothy's, they can also be thrown in the wash (cold, gentle cycle after laces and insoles have been removed). Do not place these in the dryer, either as they may shrink or change form.

Please check back again as new resources are being added often.

Let's Keep in Touch

Sign up to receive special updates and quarterly newsletters.

First Name

Email

Human-centered design + strategy

Linkedin Envelope

© 2024 Parisa Consulting. All Rights Reserved. | Legal

Scroll to Top