Small Business Web Resources & Tools

A curated collection of tools for entrepreneurs and small business owners — marketing and social media tools, email marketing platforms, competitive research, and more. Most are free to use, some require a paid plan. As a web hosting provider, we know these tools well — this is the shortlist we actually recommend.

Competitive Intelligence

  • SimilarWeb — analyze your website data, or a competitor’s site data
  • Ahrefs — check backlinks and explore a website’s data
  • SEMrush — see where competitors rank for keywords, and their traffic

Conversion Rate Optimization

  • Optimizely — test different page ideas without a programmer
  • Hotjar — find out where customers click most, with heatmaps
  • Google Keyword Planner — free tool to find keywords and how they perform
  • Down For Everyone or Just Me? — check if your site is really down or it’s just you
  • Qualaroo — popup surveys to ask visitors important questions

Data & Analytics

  • WeTransfer — transfer up to 2GB of data for free
  • Bitly — shorten any URL and track link performance
  • Google Analytics — detailed insights on traffic, referrals, and organic search
  • Feedly — save articles and content to view later, organized in one place
  • Google Trends — find out what the internet is searching for

Email Marketing Tools

  • MailChimp — email marketing with a generous free tier
  • AWeber — a long-standing autoresponder email service
  • Contact Form 7 — popular WordPress plugin for collecting emails via forms

Finance & Budgeting

  • Mint — manage personal finances and track your credit score
  • Xero — online accounting, an alternative to QuickBooks
  • Gusto — makes paying employees and freelancers easier

Marketing & Design Tools

  • HubSpot Blog Topic Generator — don’t know what to blog about? Let it find one
  • Woorank — check your website’s SEO and marketing potential
  • The Noun Project — icons for graphics and marketing
  • Favicon Generator — turn your logo into a favicon
  • Templated — 850+ free CSS and HTML5 site templates
  • WordPress — the most popular CMS on the internet, and it’s free
  • Fontello — free icons for your website, pages, or posts

Online Learning

  • Skillshare — learn new skills with online classes
  • Khan Academy — free education from digital marketing to programming
  • Coursera — courses from the world’s top universities, many free
  • Codecademy — learn to code, or just learn the basics

Project Management

  • Trello — manage projects, ideas, and teams visually
  • Evernote — a digital notepad and document organizer
  • Google Drive — share files and collaborate with real-time editing
  • Dropbox — on-the-go cloud storage for businesses
  • Upwork & Fiverr — hire freelancers and virtual assistants for any task
  • Slack — collaborate with your team from anywhere
  • Yoast SEO — a popular WordPress SEO plugin
  • Moz Local — make sure local customers can find you online

Social Media

  • Buffer — social media management for marketers
  • Hootsuite — a classic dashboard to control all your social accounts
  • LinkedIn — connect with professionals in your industry

Free Stock Photography

  • Unsplash — free high-resolution images, no copyright restrictions
  • StockSnap — free high-resolution images, no copyright restrictions
  • Gratisography — free high-resolution images from Ryan McGuire
  • Negative Space — free photos released under Creative Commons CC0

Web Design Tools

  • Placeit — simple mockups for phones, tablets, and more
  • PicMonkey — edit photos and create collages
  • Dribbble — free designs, mockups, vector images, and icons
  • Paletton — find your color palette and matching hex codes
  • 1001 Free Fonts — find the right font for your site’s style
  • GIMP — free, full-featured photo editing and image authoring
  • Pixlr — edit photos and images right in your browser
  • PageSpeed Insights — check your website speed and performance

Want us to just handle the technical side for you instead? Get in touch.