A Content Delivery Network or CDN is a service that can help your website to run faster and more efficiently. It’s a network of servers where you can store data from your site in different worldwide locations. I personally recommend MaxCDN because it integrates with WordPress fairly easily and their customer service is fantastic.
Recommended Web Services for Web Designers
When it comes to web design, the web services you use play an essential part in your productivity and results. Check out my list of greatly useful web services for web designers and front-end developers below.
Want to know what's inside my web designer toolbox? Make sure to have a look at all the tools and resources I use to get things done.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a freemium online service that speeds up and secures your site by acting as a proxy. With CloudFlare, you can protect your website against malware attacks, save bandwidth and reduce page load time. While I think the free plan already includes all you might need, you can go further and upgrade to one of their paid plans.
Sucuri
Sucuri is a website security company that protects your website from hackers, malware, DDoS and blacklists. When you enable Sucuri, all your site traffic goes through their cloud-based firewall before coming to your hosting server. I use Sucuri on client sites to block all the attacks and only send legitimate visitors.
Pingdom
Pingdom is a website monitoring service that allows webmasters to analyze the load speed of their websites, find bottlenecks, and learn how to resolve them. Enter the URL of your website, select the test location then hit the Start Test button and wait for the results to roll in. Now you know what to fix to improve site performance.
Diff Checker
Diff Checker is a free online diff tool that allows you to easily make a text comparison and find the differences between two texts. Just paste the two texts and hit the Find Difference button. The two texts are shown side by side, with differences highlighted. I use Diff Checker to compare code snippets. I like that you can save diffs if needed.
G Suite
Stop using your @gmail.com email address for your business needs! Instead, go get a branded email address that builds credibility and promotes your brand. Thanks to G Suite (formerly Google Apps), it’s actually quite easy and inexpensive to setup. G Suite also includes services like Docs, Calendar, Drive, Hangouts and more.
Pexels
Pexels is a website that helps designers, bloggers and everyone who is looking for an image to find great photos that you can use everywhere for free. All photos on Pexels are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This means you can use them at no cost for any personal and/or commercial purpose.
Unsplash
Just like on Pexels, all photos published on Unsplash are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes. You can even create multiple collections to group photos you like. Check Unsplash out, there are fabulous pics there!
Placeholder.com
Placeholder.com is a free online placeholder service that allows you to insert dummy images during web development. What I like about Placeholder.com is that it is very flexible: you can easily change things like image dimensions, background color, text color, image format. You can even add custom text if necessary.
Subtle Patterns
Subtle Patterns is a great resource for web designers in need of seamless texture patterns, free to use. You can choose among 400+ patterns and each of them is tileable so you can use it as a background image for your web project. I like very much that you are able to easily preview any pattern you selected with just one click.
Coolors
Coolors is is an online designer tool that allows you to easily combine colors and generate beautiful color palettes. Just press the spacebar to get a fresh new 5-colors palette. Click on the lock icon to keep the colors you like and repeat the process until you have the perfect colors combination that match your needs.
Font Pair
Font Pair is an online designer tool that suggests good pairings of fonts found in the Google Fonts library. You can filter font pairings based on general font classifications like: Sans-Serif/Serif ; Sans-Serif/Sans-Serif ; Cursive/Sans-Serif ; Cursive/Serif ; Serif/Serif. Definitely a great source of inspiration for font lovers!
Typeform
Typeform is a SaaS (software as a service) company that specializes in online form building. It makes it easy to build and share any type of online forms and surveys thanks to their simple drag and drop interface. Typeform is free but you can subscribe to their Pro plans if you expect more than 100 responses per month.
Feedly
Feedly is my go-to news aggregator to stay up-to-date on topics I want to follow. Just add the URLs of the blogs or websites you like and Feedly will automatically find the matching RSS feeds. You can use it on various web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android, and it is also available as a cloud-based service.
Trello
Trello is a cross-platform and freemium collaboration tool that organizes your team projects into boards and cards. In one glance, you know what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process. I use Trello to list and manage all the tasks I need to accomplish on each web client project.
Dropbox
Using Dropbox on your Mac or PC is just like using any other folder on your hard drive, except the files you drag into your Dropbox folder automatically sync online and to any other computers or mobile devices linked to your account. I am a Dropbox Pro plan subscriber and I use it to store up to 1 TB of data and share files with clients.
UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot is a reliable website monitoring service I use to get immediately notified if a client’s website is down. Up to 50 monitors, checked every 5 minutes, are included in their Free plan. UptimeRobot’s user interface is clean and site monitors are very easy to set up. Also, website stats are not affected, which is great.
Font Awesome
Font Awesome is an open source icon font that you can use for both personal and commercial projects. As I write this, Font Awesome includes a growing set of 675 vector icons. I like to use Font Awesome icons on clients websites because they are scalable, they load fast and you can easily customize them via CSS.