The Platform
Self-Hosted WordPress
As you can guess, our website is powered by the best publishing platform on the web, WordPress.org. It’s important that you know the difference between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org and choose the right platform for your needs (we usually recommend going with the self-hosted option).
There's a common misconception that WordPress is strictly for ‘blog' style websites, which is how the platform originally started but now it powers over 30% of the internet as well as fortune 500 companies.
While there are many blogging platforms out there, we always recommend using WordPress because of the freedom and flexibility you have to customize your website.
Note: I believe in transparency on the web, so please be aware that some of the links in this post may be affiliate links and I may be compensated a commission if you end up making a purchase. Also, note that I only recommend products and services that I have personally used and tested. Thank you for your support!
Web Hosting
WP Engine
Your web host is where your website actually lives. It's who will be in charge of serving up your website's content when someone types it into a Google search bar.
There are thousands of web host options out there and after testing the best options on the market, we chose WP Engine and have been extremely happy with their service.
The CompleteAgent brand hosts more than 30 websites on WP Engine's servers with an average speed of under 2 seconds load time and ZERO hacks EVER. We're very happy.
Design / Theme
Custom Design
CompleteAgent uses a custom designed theme built specifically for our website. Unfortunately, this design is not available for download or sale directly but you're more than welcome to reverse engineer any parts you may like. ????
We built our custom theme on top of the Beaver Builder Theme Framework.
Don't let the name fool you, Beaver Builder is a powerful page builder and theme framework combo that makes building website take minutes, not months.
If you're looking for high-quality professionally designed WordPress theme templates, we really love the stuff at StudioPress.
Security
Sucuri
Sucuri offers a free plugin that works great as well as a paid web monitoring and malware cleanup service. It helps us enhance our WordPress security and actively block cyber attacks.
Note: WP Engine takes on a lot of the burden of protecting our websites from malware and getting hacked. Another reason we love WP Engine so much.
Performance
CloudFlare
CloudFlare is a “website performance solution” that does quite a few things and does them very well, mostly for free too. Simply put, CloudFlare allows you to connect your website DNS (Domain Name Servers) settings up using their platform and that gives you access to their tools.
Their platform speeds up, hardens, protects and boosts your website.
Sounds cool right? It is very cool.
Marketing
Drip Email Marketing
After a few hard years of using MailChimp and then ConvertKit, we've been happily hooked on Drip as our email service provider (ESP) of choice for the past 2+ years. We love the automation features and dead simple broadcast and subscription setups, not to mention the sweet free starter plan.
Pixel Caffeine
Pixel Caffeine is a free plugin that was created by the people behind AdEspresso that we use to manage our Facebook retargeting pixels and custom audiences, and we love it. It makes it easy and simple to create new custom audiences directly in your WordPress backend while having full control of segmenting options.
Pretty Links
Pretty Links allows you to create readable, speakable, and easily memorable short links using your WordPress website and domain name without having to leave the admin area.
Social Warfare
Social Warfare is the best social sharing plugin for WordPress. Ok, that's not a fact, but it's my favorite and I've tried a lot. The features, interface, blazing fast speed and beautiful design are unmatched.
Yoast SEO
We use Yoast SEO to improve our on-page SEO when writing blog posts and pages to help us rank for the keywords that we want to rank for.
There's no better SEO solution for WordPress than Yoast SEO in our opinion, and best of all, their free option is plenty powerful to get the job done.
Behind the Scenes
ACF (Advanced Custom Fields)
We use ACF for many things but mostly in our theme design when creating custom post types. We also used ACF to create blog post checklists that only show up on the backend of each post (very handy).
Clicky Analytics
Although we also track our website using the free Google Analytics service, we also use and gladly pay for Clicky Analytics. It does everything GA does but it's ace in the hole feature is their heat maps that show you exactly where your visitors are clicking.
Custom Post Type UI
This plugin allows you to create custom post types within your WordPress site that you can assign to be anything from special blog posts, podcast episodes, landing pages or listings of any type really, the possibilities are limitless.
Thanks for checking out the inner workings of the CompleteAgent website and what makes it run. We'll update this page whenever we make any additions to our line up.
If you want to be updated too, click here to subscribe and get weekly and actionable advice fresh to your inbox.
