Lifestyle, food and drink, and our family life and travel adventures.
I have been blogging for A LONG time now – well over twelve years – and I started this particular blog when my daughter was six months old and she’ll be turning 11 in the new year!
Over the last couple of years, I have also started a few other blogs in different niches (I say a few but there are at least ten!). I’ve started these for different reasons; some are purely to make money and some are more specific niches that I want to focus on, such as travel or fitness or my local area of Nottinghamshire. I’ve also recently started a Christmas blog too which I’m currently building up.
It is something that I have really been enjoying and I feel like I am now at the point where I can create and build up a new blog pretty quickly. There are tons of ‘how to start a blog’ posts out there so I am not going to do that, but instead, I thought I would just share some of the websites and tools I use during the process.
So if you’re starting a blog or thinking about it, or just want to find the best hosting or place to buy domain names then hopefully this post will help you.
If you are looking to buy a new domain for your website then I would suggest first of all looking at NameCheap to buy domains from – I only discovered them last year, but they are now my favourite. They seem to generally be really good prices and you can often find an offer code, and it’s all easy to use and get set up.
Their marketplace, in particular is brilliant if you aren’t looking for a specific domain name, say your own name or something. In the marketplace you can browse a list of domain names that others are selling which means you can just look for a domain name you like or one with a good Domain Authority (DA).
In the past I always used either 123reg or GoDaddy when I wanted a new domain. GoDaddy has some people with questionable ethics behind it and lots don’t agree with some of their promotional methods so I tend not to use it anymore, however, there are always discount codes available for GoDaddy and so it is usually pretty cheap.
Choosing a blog name can be hard. Whether you are starting a blog from scratch, want a new name for a current blog, or you’ve bought a domain name off someone, it can be hard to think of a great name for your blog that sounds good, tells people what the blog is about (if that is something you want), isn’t already being used, isn’t too long and that just works for you.
I have spent far too long in the past trying to think up a great name for a blog or trying to think of any decent name to fit in with a domain name that I’ve bought off someone else! Sometimes you just need a bit of inspiration to find a name that works and so a business name generator can be so helpful to find great blog name ideas, saving you so many hours brainstorming yourself and giving you ideas you may not have thought of. It only suggests names that have a corresponding domain available which is so handy as it’s so frustrating thinking you’ve found a great name and then it’s not available in any way, shape or form.
I’ve used it for my more recent blogs that I have started (and will do for any more I create – I’m a bit addicted I think!).
I have used Bluehost for years for this blog but I started using Lyrical Host for my newer blogs and I absolutely love it. The customer service is incredible (they seem to always get back to you within a few hours and sort everything out for you!), I’ve had no problems with downtime or anything like that (unlike with Bluehost!) and it’s a good price for a year to host A LOT of websites. You can get 10% off your hosting package at Lyrical Host by using my code LOUHEG.
There are cheaper ones out there; I do use Namecheap’s hosting for three blogs because I could add new blogs to my hosting myself with that one and I didn’t have any patience that day! And that’s a cheap one to go for.
Lots of bloggers I know also recommend 34SP but I have no experience with them myself.
For my more recent blogs I have used Koba Themes as they are totally my style and taste. I like clean, minimalist, modern themes that have lots of different settings and options so I can make my blog look the way I want it to, myself. I wouldn’t say Koba Themes are the easiest to customise and find what you are looking for, and I’ve struggled to change some of the code so that it does what I want it to, but I do really like them overall and have purchased a couple now.
I have also bought themes from Restored316 a couple of times in the past (this blog has one from there) and they make really lovely themes but they only create them to be used on the Kadence framework now and I believe that you have to pay for that yearly, and I’m just not up for that with themes – I have to pay for enough stuff already!
There are loads of great free WordPress themes available so especially if you are just getting started then they would be your best option and you can still do loads with them and make them your own.
If you really like the look of someone’s blog then head right to the very bottom and it will most likely say what theme they use, which you can then search for. However, remember that what they have probably isn’t what it looked like straight out the box so you won’t necessarily be able to get something just like it, but it can be a good starting point for working out what you want from a theme.
I use Unsplash almost daily for blog posts. Unsplash have thousands of incredible photos that you are allowed to use for free in blog posts or however else you like. So many talented photographers put their photos on there for us to use and it’s a brilliant resource and I can almost always find the type of photo I’m looking for.
Pixabay is also a popular stock photo site that has tons of photos you can use for free. I tend to use Unsplash all the time but Pixabay is a popular choice for photos too.
I have used Picmonkey for years and years for editing my own photos for my blog as well as resizing stock photos to make them smaller. It’s mostly very straightforward to use (lots of people love Canva but I just don’t find it that intuitive). You can do so much with Picmonkey, from simple cropping and resizing to more complicated edits.
I use the premium version of Picmonkey as I use it so often and I think it is worth the £4.99 per month to remove the ads and be able to use my own fonts. I use it for pretty much every post that I write to edit my photographs and occasionally to add fonts over some of them. It’s easy to use and there’s so much you can do with it.
If I want to edit photos on my phone, usually for Instagram but sometimes for blog posts, I use Lightroom. You can add your own presets that have been made for Lightroom and I have bought a few before so I really like to use them as it makes editing the way I like my photos to look, quicker and easier. You can do all the standard edits and easily crop and resize your photos.
I love Buffer. It allows me to share my blog posts quickly and easily at times and dates of my choosing. It is also very easy to then reshare those posts after they have gone out if you don’t have much time to rewrite a social media post, which is useful because I am lazy.
I pay $15 a month for Buffer, and with that, I can schedule up to 100 posts at a time, across 10 different social profiles but there are other cheaper options available. On the free Buffer, you can schedule up to 10 posts on each account so it’s still worth using even if you don’t want to pay.
You can try Buffer free for 7 days here.
Missinglettr helps you to grow your social presence by quickly and easily creating dozens of social media posts for the year ahead, for each blog post that you write. It’s free to use for a standard plan, or you can get some great discounts on the pro plan with these offers:
30 days access to Pro + Curate for $5 (a saving of $103). New customers only.
50% off any plan for the first 3 months. New customers only,
Tailwind is for Pinterest scheduling and when I actually use it I think it’s brilliant. I haven’t paid much attention to Pinterest for a little while now, although I should, because when I did use it I went from a few repins each month to hundreds. You can check out Tailwind here.
I hope you found this helpful if you are looking for any tools or websites to help with setting up your blog or making improvements to a current one. Please let us know in the comments if you have any great blogging tools to recommend!
Welcome to Birds and Lilies! I'm Lou: mother, blogger and freelance writer. This is my lifestyle blog, where I talk about motherhood, infertility and IVF, beauty, my love for food and wine, as well as my thoughts about stuff, and our real-life and travel adventures.
Contact: [email protected]
