Not a list of everything that exists. This is what is running right now, what each one replaced, and the thing I wish somebody had told me before I set it up.
None of these are affiliate links. I have not set any of them up yet. When I do, the link will say so right where you click it — and the list will not change, because I picked these before there was any money in mentioning them.
This is the thing the rest of the channel is about, so I will keep it short. It runs in a terminal, it reads the actual files in your project, and it changes them — which is a different thing from a chat window you paste code into and out of. The reason that matters is not speed. It is that the work stops being clicking and starts being describing, and describing is something you can do on a walk.
I have been on this host for years and the reason I stayed is not the speed, it is the terminal. SSH with WP-CLI means the database and the bulk jobs are reachable by something other than my hands, so the weekend work became one command.
One thing I wish somebody had told me: tell your host before you point automation at your own site. I got my own address blacklisted because the traffic looked like a bot, and unpicking that took a day I did not have.
Free, and for your own site it is better than anything you can pay for. The paid tools are modelling what your traffic probably looks like. This is what it actually was — real impressions, real positions, the real queries that brought real people to real pages.
If you connect one thing this month, connect this. Almost everything worth doing in your first year falls out of it, and most people set it up, look once, and never go back.
I was renting this capability by the month, priced by how many contacts I had, which means it got more expensive exactly as it started working. This runs inside WordPress on its own tables, so the price stops moving when the list grows.
The worry everybody has is that it will slow the site down, and it is the wrong worry. It loads nothing on the front end, because your contacts are not WordPress users and none of it runs when a visitor reads a page.
Free, and it fixes a problem most people do not know they have until it bites. Your campaigns and your actual business email should not leave through the same sender, because the bounces and complaints a campaign earns attach to the address you genuinely need people to receive.
This routes by the From address, so transactional mail keeps going out one way and marketing goes another — one plugin, one settings screen, two reputations kept apart.
Roughly ten cents per thousand emails, which is close enough to nothing that cost stops being a reason to choose anything else.
What nobody warns you about is the sandbox. A brand new account can only send to addresses you have already verified, and it does not feel like a restriction — it feels like it is working. I had a real person's confirmation email rejected before I understood that. Ask for production access first and connect it second.
What I use when I want search volume at scale without paying a tier gate for API access. It is pay as you go and it is fractions of a cent a call, so occasional use costs a rounding error instead of a subscription you forget you are paying.
One thing to know before you trust a number from it: its difficulty score is not the same metric as the big tools' keyword difficulty. They look alike and they are not, so do not put them in the same column.
I pull exports from it, and I want to be honest that this is the whole of what I use it for. It is genuinely good at showing you a market you are not in yet, which is the one thing your own data cannot do.
For your own site, though, Search Console is both more accurate and free. So if money is tight, spend it on the research you cannot get anywhere else, not on reporting you already own.
It sits in front of the site and mostly its job is to be boring, which is the correct job for it. Free tier, and it caches pages so the host does less work.
One thing worth knowing before you build anything that behaves differently for different people: it will cache the first response it sees and hand that same response to everybody. I ran into exactly that building this site, and the fix was to stop trying to render the difference into the page and ask for it separately instead.
What is not on this list
No page builder, and no purchased theme. That is not snobbery about them — I ran both for years and they did the job I needed at the time. It is that the job changed. The reason to buy a theme was the thousand hours of work you could not do yourself, and that is the exact thing that stopped being true.
This site is the demonstration. Custom theme, no framework, no builder, one stylesheet and one small script — built the way that lesson describes.