Solutions
These are great site tools / services that my clients use. Review these to see if any make sense for your site. Many are free or offer a free trial. Contact me if you have any questions on these.
WEB HOSTING
I've worked with many hosting providers over the years, and these are among the best values you will find. I can help you in moving your site to a new provider as well.
Hostgator Providing all the standard and premium hosting options - shared, virtual, dedicated, etc., Hostgator is one of the mainstays in hosting. Their prices are competitive, and a solid choice for hosting. I have tried many over the years, and seen my clients using all different providers, and Hostgator is where I've settled.
PAYMENT PROVIDERS
These two providers integrate into many shopping carts, and I can also perform custom integrations to your application.
CDG Payment Provider - Low cost credit card provider for accepting online payments. They can approve your account in as little as 1 hour! This is a solid choice with a low monthly fee. I have satisfied clients who have been using them for years. They are integrated to many cart solutions. They have a mobile app and swiper solution as well.
Authorize.net Payments - top payment provider used by many websites for accepting credit cards.
SHOPPING CARTS
Sunshop Shopping Cart - php based shopping cart with many features.
WooCommerce for Wordpress - Full ecommerce solution for Wordpress sites. While the main plugin is free, most add-on modules cost money. It's a great solution if you run a Wordpress site.
DIAGNOSTICS
Google Webmaster Tools is a google service that tells you quite a bit about how google sees your site. Every webmaster should review your site info at least monthly.
Bing Webmaster Tools is the Bing counterpart to the above tools. Bing has a significant share of the search market, so it's important to use this tool as well.
W3C Validator - Check your html / css coding for problem code. It's hard to eliminate all errors, but this will help you clean up your site code.
SSL Checker determines if your SSL certificate is installed correctly. Some browser will issue warnings to the user if a certificate has any issues at all, which costs you sales.
PageSpeed Insights is another Google tool which tests your site speed and makes recommendations for improving speed.
Keyword Position - test some keywords and see where your site ranks among the major search engines.
STATS & MONITORING
Web Canary is a service I provide to current clients at no charge, to monitor their websites and servers for downtime. If you are a current customer, email me for an account.
Clicky is a great analytics / monitoring solution for your site. Get realtime visitor information, in a very easy to digest format. The basic features are FREE, but upgrade for detailed heatmaps, site monitoring (get alerts when your site is down). Also get several SEO features, like keyword ranking, for an all-in-one solution to monitoring your site.
Zopim is a realtime Chat application for your site. Essential for e-commerce store owners, this lightweight and low cost application lets you interact and close sales with customers as they browse the site.
