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Tools such as web hosting providers, CDNs, and email marketing software can help you build a website and market your business. Below, you’ll find our favorite web hosting companies, domain registration tools, website builders, marketing tools, and more.
Best Small Business Tools Shortlist
Small businesses use a lot of different types of tools. The best ones for you depend on what you’re doing, what you’re missing, and the size of your team.
Our Top Picks
Best Web Hosting Provider
Best WordPress Theme Framework
Best Genesis Theme
Best WordPress Backup Plugin
Best Privacy Policy Generator
Best Content Delivery Network
Best for Website SEO Analysis
Best Website Analytics
Best Communications Suite
Best SEO Software
Best Email Marketing Software
Digital.com dives deep into every topic it covers to offer trusted and reliable recommendations for the best business tools. See our review methodology.
Tips From an Expert
Keep your tool stack as simple as possible.
If you’re just getting started, you don’t need a ton of complex tools. Instead, focus on keeping everything as lean as possible. Using too many tools becomes unwieldy, expensive, and overkill very quickly. Start with a few tools, get used to them, and consider adding new tools when you have a better idea of what you’re missing.
The Top Small Business Tools of 2023
Features
- Affordable upfront pricing
- Fail-proof website creation process
- Ultimate flexibility with WordPress
Starting Price
$2.95 per month
Free Plan/Trial
No
What it’s Best For
Quickly and securely building a new website for your business without breaking the bank
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If you don’t yet have a business website, Bluehost is the way to go. It’s affordable, beginner-friendly, and versatile enough for just about any type of site. Every plan includes a free domain name for the first year, an SSL certificate, SSD storage, and 24/7 support.
Even if you’ve never built a website before, Bluehost’s guided onboarding process makes site creation a breeze. If you can click a mouse, you can build a professional website.
Best WordPress Theme Framework
Features
- Lightweight code for fast website speed
- Easily customizable with child themes
- Built using HTML 5
Starting Price
$360 per year
Free Plan/Trial
No
What it’s Best For
Designing an SEO-friendly, easily navigable, and professional looking WordPress website
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Genesis is a very popular WordPress theme framework by StudioPress. And like all StudioPress themes, it’s search engine friendly. State-of-the-art code and smart design architecture will ensure search engine crawlers can index your content without errors.
Genesis child themes are mobile responsive and built using HTML 5, making them functional and future-proof.
Best Genesis Theme
Features
- Numerous theme options to choose from
- Lightening fast and lightweight at its core
- Optimized for Gutenberg & ecommerce ready
Starting Price
Included with Genesis
Free Plan/Trial
No
What it’s Best For
Putting the finishing touches on your new WordPress website without coding anything
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Altitude Pro is not just another WordPress theme; with Genesis’ underlying framework, the functionality and aesthetics are boosted. Customize your site with several different nifty theme options and optimize it for mobile screens.
With Altitude Pro, you can have a brand-new website up and running with just a few clicks.
Genesis is already bursting with beautiful themes, but give Altitude Pro a look if you want a rapid solution.
Best WordPress Backup Plugin
Features
- Protect your website against security threats
- Restore old versions in just a few clicks
- Automatic file repair
Starting Price
$4.95 per month
Free Plan/Trial
No
What it’s Best For
Keeping your new website protected against hackers and other online threats
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Make sure you have a reliable backup service that takes regular backups of your WordPress website.
VaultPress is a reliable contingency measure to include in your small business toolkit in the event of malicious attacks, outages, and natural disasters. It automatically backs up your site and allows you to view backups by hour, day, month, or year.
VaultPress also has a stats page that shows you when your posts are published and when visitors post comments. You have three pricing plans, and there are no long-term contracts.
Best Privacy Policy Generator
Features
- Generate different types of policies in seconds
- Privacy, terms of use, cookies, EULA, and more
- Free and premium one-time payment options
Starting Price
$20 one-time fee
Free Plan/Trial
Free templates
What it’s Best For
Generating legal pages for your new website to protect your visitors and yourself
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Writing a privacy policy can be pretty boring. Worse yet, attorneys can cost copious amounts of money, even though every privacy policy seems to look the same.
PrivacyPolicies.com is here to save the day. If you run a commercial website, you can pay a small $20 fee to generate a robust privacy policy tailored to your site’s needs. For other sites, it’s free.
The generator will adapt to your country’s requirements so that non-US websites can use it safely. Just tick a few boxes about how your site collects information, and you’re on your way.
The website says, “every website needs a privacy policy.” Don’t let a small oversight lead to a big lawsuit.
Features
- 310 global data centers
- Removes latency caused by distance
- Generous free plan is sufficient for most
Starting Price
$20 per month
Free Plan/Trial
Yes
What it’s Best For
Speeding up your website–saves copies of your site on servers closer to your visitors
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Cloudflare is a global content delivery network (CDN) with a robust infrastructure. It has POPs on every major continent in the world. You’ll be connected to the nearest server no matter where you are on Earth. That means no more slow loading times.
There’s a free plan for small websites, and the company offers more robust monthly plans beginning at $20. All plans include Cloudflare’s acclaimed DDoS protection, SSL encryption, and up-to-date internet protocols.
Cloudflare was built on a mission to provide the Internet with a reliable, secure CDN, and it has been very successful.
Best for Website SEO Analysis
Features
- Google Search Console is free for everyone
- Get up-to-date info on SEO performance
- Spot and resolve technical site issues
Starting Price
Everything is free
Free Plan/Trial
Yes
What it’s Best For
Monitoring how your site’s doing in search + finding and fixing usability problems
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Once your website is up and running, website analytics will help you understand what’s going right and what needs to change. Here’s where Google Search Console can be of assistance. It’s a free SEO diagnostic and monitoring tool that provides information about your website and visitors.
You can use it to measure fundamental statistics, like:
- The number of people visiting your site
- The most popular pages
- Whether more people visit from desktop or mobile.
You can also identify and fix website errors, create a robots.txt file, and submit a sitemap to Google.
It’s an invaluable tool and ideal for businesses without money for expensive alternatives.
Best Website Analytics
Features
- Google Analytics is entirely free
- Learn more about your website visitors
- Track and monitor marketing campaigns
Starting Price
Everything is free
Free Plan/Trial
Yes
What it’s Best For
Monitoring website traffic, traffic sources, marketing campaigns, PPC ads, conversions, and more
Read More
Google Analytics is a very popular service consisting of custom reports, remarketing options, multi-channel funnels, and more. The free web analytics service also offers statistics for search engine optimization and marketing purposes.
Knowing your audience is vital to constructing a successful business website. Use Google Analytics to:
- Find out how visitors locate your website
- Segment visitors
- Fine-tune your website to improve the user experience.
Instead of using expensive, resource-hogging tools, this is the complete solution to help identify your audience and find optimization opportunities.
Best Communications Suite
Features
- Collaborate via multiple channels
- Give your team professional email accounts
- Work together in Google Docs & Sheets
Starting Price
$6 per user per month
Free Plan/Trial
No
What it’s Best For
Document collaboration, shared storage space, team chat, business email accounts, & calendars
Read More
Google Workspace is a cloud-based office application. Members of your team can work simultaneously on a single document without the need to send each other multiple versions or corrections.
Millions of businesses use Google Workspace to facilitate team communication, collaboration, and productivity. It offers email, calendars, and messaging, which means you can use one streamlined product instead of separate programs.
Best SEO Software
Features
- Full suite of SEO tools
- Run ongoing SEO audits on your website
- Analyze what your competitors are doing
Starting Price
$99 per month
Free Plan/Trial
No
What it’s Best For
Competitor analysis, keyword research, backlink monitoring, keyword clustering, audits
Read More
Ahrefs is a backlink and competitor SEO research tool that uses its crawler to bring you the latest intel. The index collects information from 6 billion web pages and updates it every 15 minutes.
As a member, you can make the most of its SERPs analysis and site explorer, and see detailed information about backlinks you’ve won and lost over time.
Whether you’re spying on your competitors or analyzing your traffic, Ahrefs is the best way to go about it.
Features
- Up to 1,000 monthly emails at no cost
- Professionally made pre-built email templates
- Sign up forms and landing pages
Starting Price
$13 per month
Free Plan/Trial
Yes
What it’s Best For
Starting an email list, sending newsletters, connecting with your audience
Read More
Email should be essential to your lead and customer engagement strategy. MailChimp is a valuable email marketing software platform to consider. More than 10 million businesses use MailChimp to promote and distribute content.
You can use the service to send attention-grabbing emails to customers and easily streamline the email engagement process. Even with the free basic plan, building great-looking, automated small business marketing material is child’s play. And upgrading provides even more helpful tools.
Whether you’re new to the game or have thousands of subscribers, MailChimp is easy to use and well-regarded. Implementing a good marketing strategy is one of the most important parts of developing a website, so don’t neglect email in your strategy.
Other Small Business Tools
Aside from the 11 tools above, there are dozens of other options out there for different businesses in different situations. There’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer to any problem you’re trying to solve–sometimes it takes trial and error before getting it right. But as always, keep things as simple as possible.
Just because there’s a tool for everything, doesn’t mean you need to use it.
Akamai Cloud Hosting
Akamai is a cloud-hosting company with over 40,000 customers. Compared to titans like DigitalOcean, Linode offers competitive prices and invaluable hosting features.
Besides ensuring 99.9% uptime, the Linode Manager mobile app provides a straightforward and content-rich user interface. SSD storage is standard with every VPS, so everything moves super fast. And with a programmable API, a virtual console in case you can’t get to your server, and a simple stack deployer, you’ll always have what you need.
SiteGround Web Hosting
If you’re looking for a cheap web hosting provider other than Bluehost that offers the latest technology and fast speeds, give SiteGround some serious consideration.
This host provides free daily backups and restores a domain name, SSD storage, and a website builder. There’s 24/7 support, and the team can help you transfer an existing website at no cost when you initially sign up.
HTML.com
HTML is the code that displays the content of web pages, along with various scripting languages and styles. If you’re looking to make your website, it’s necessary to know the basics of HTML. Even if you plan on using a drag-and-drop designer, it’s still handy to know how to make tweaks or use custom code to get things done.
If you want to learn anything more complicated than how to italicize text, HTML.com is a great starting point. It’s a simple step-by-step course, and you can use it as a handy reference guide. The information is all there, in an easy-to-learn format. Even if you just need a quick cheat sheet when you’ve forgotten your basics, HTML.com is your new go-to.
DummyText.com
When making a website from scratch, it’s necessary to check the integrity of the text boxes, fonts, and other text-based areas of the pages. That’s why designers use placeholder text, otherwise known as dummy text.
This often manifests itself as lorem ipsum, a scrambled Latin passage that passes for accurate English without being distracting.
Adding dummy text to your infant site can sometimes be difficult and leave remnants of code in your HTML that could be a nightmare to remove. Thankfully, DummyText.com provides a much simpler solution.
By injecting a small script into the code, the site is immediately populated with as much lorem ipsum as you need. It takes a few small tweaks to tailor it to your site.
If programming isn’t your strong point, the site also includes an easy script generator that will generate the syntax for however many lines of dummy text you need.
This is a great resource if you just need a quick solution.
Comodo SSL Certificates
Encryption is necessary for any website that sells a product or stores sensitive information. Without it, malicious users could access passwords, addresses, and credit card information.
That’s where SSL certification comes in. Comodo is a leading provider of SSL digital certificates for home offices, businesses, e-commerce stores, and enterprises.
Trusted by all browsers, the company provides 256-bit encryption, unlimited server licenses, phone support, and a $250,000 warranty. Different packages are available at specific price points.
With an SSL certificate, you can encourage visitors to browse your site and make purchases with peace of mind.
Down.com Website Checker
Downtime is a killer for any website. But is it the fault of your hosting company? If you can’t load a site, it could be because of a problem with your internet connection, and there’s nothing the host can do if that’s the case.
With Down.com, you can quickly check if any website is offline. Type the domain name into the text box on the homepage, and click the Check Website button. It will instantly tell you if the website is offline.
You can use this tool to test your website or any website on the internet to see if it’s up or not.
Down.com also publishes web hosting reviews that make it easy to compare speed, uptime, and support response time for dozens of popular hosting providers. That way, you can see the hosts that offered the best uptime in genuine user tests.
Rankinity Rank Tracker
Keeping track of your website’s performance on search engines can be frustrating and time-consuming. Rankinity, a cloud-based keyword rank-tracking service, does this for you. With intuitive graphs, it informs you about your search rankings and competitors’ rankings so you can stay ahead of the game.
Rankinity’s affordable and advanced tracking delivers real-time information, so you can constantly adjust your business marketing efforts to improve your rankings. Instead of floundering blindly and hoping Google will notice you, this tool helps you to get on top of website promotion.
Social Warfare Sharing Buttons
Social Warfare is a lightweight, fast WordPress plugin with great features.
Along with modern and appealing social buttons, it includes a tweet counter, analytics to see who has clicked on your social buttons, and shortcodes to add buttons wherever you need them.
Having attractive share buttons vastly increases the chance of visitors clicking them. Along with all the other features and the analytics tracker, Social Warfare is worth the investment.
FreshBooks Accounting Software
FreshBooks is a cloud-based accounting package for business owners who want to place, create, and manage mail invoices in one place.
It is ideal for newbie small business owners, businesses with a few clients, companies that send out invoices every few weeks, and those who want to track the time they spend on a project.
FreshBooks offers several useful features, including:
- Faster billing
- Automated collections
- Recurring charges
It can also be integrated with other sites and applications, making it the go-to for cleanly tracking your invoices.
PayPal Payment Processing
PayPal is the gargantuan leader in online payments and a go-to service for small businesses. Using PayPal, it’s easier than ever to send and receive money online.
Most online vendors integrate with PayPal, and you should be one of them. You can use the service as a primary means to be paid by your users, though that’s more typical of freelance writers and artists.
PayPal also allows you to create invoices directly on its website.
Skype Communication Tools
Skype is a market leader in the VOIP and messaging market, with over 300 million monthly users. It’s an invaluable application for free communicate with team members, freelancers, and other entrepreneurs.
The Skype application offers screen sharing, group voice and video calls, instant messaging, and premium services. The company also has a separate product, Skype for Business, aimed at companies that need reliable VOIP services.