Our Recommended Tools
MDDHosting
MDDHosting is who we use for both our agency’s website hosting as well as our clients. We started on their Elastic Reseller plan but upgraded to their Plaid servers for lightning-fast hosting on all of our client accounts. This isn’t a managed WordPress hosting so make sure you’re willing to manage cPanel. However, MDDHosting’s support is top-tier and has helped us out countless times.
Ninja Forms
Ninja Forms is our preferred WordPress form. We have the Elite package currently which gives us unlimited access to all of Ninja Forms capabilities from creating basic contact forms to advanced, multi-stepped, progress-saving application forms for our clients. Ninja Forms also allows us to integrate with enhanced conversions for server-side tracking and attribution.
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is our WordPress website backup plugin that we have in all of our client accounts. It’s one of our 3 core plugins. We pay for the premium version in order to get the automated website backups before updates and the offsite backup capabilities. The free version backs the site up to the server, but what if the server goes down?
ClickUp
ClickUp is our project management tool that keeps our team on the same page with project-based work like website builds and monthly work like actual SEO and PPC campaign management. It’s also where we house a lot of our work-related notes on client campaigns and create timelines for internal projects. For Evergrow, we pay for ClickUp because we want the automation capabilities that it comes with. However, the free version is more than enough for most agencies. That’s what we use for the podcast.
Hubspot
Hubspot is the CRM we use. We used the free version of it for years but eventually invested in the SalesHub add-on. There are a ton of add-ons you can get depending on what you need the platform to do. The SalesHub allows us to create automation to follow up with prospects as well as build quotes and agreements with productized line items and send those signable agreements directly to clients and prospects.
AgencyAnalytics
AgencyAnalytics is so far the best reporting tool we’ve used. It’s also the most expensive. We chose AgencyAnalytics after trying 2 other more affordable solutions at scale but kept running into data errors and inconsistencies. As a performance-based agency, your reporting is your greatest weapon in combatting client churn. It needs to be accurate. AgencyAnalytics doesn’t fail us.
Wix Studio
Wix was recently on the podcast talking about their new agency CMS and website builder. After learning more about it from Kobe and diving into some research, we can honestly say that if we were starting over and new about Wix Studio’s capabilities, even when it came to SEO, we might possibly be using this as our preferred CMS of choice for clients.
Divi Theme
This is what we use. We found the Divi visual builder by Elegant Themes to be the most practical visual builder for agencies building multiple WordPress websites. They offer an unlimited lifetime license for the builder at $249. Nearly every other visual builder out there has a recurring price you have to pay. Divi also has a lot of scalable features built with agencies in mind allowing us to easily duplicate sites and create global styles and modules.
Duplicator Pro
We templatize our websites so when we need to build a new website for a client, we’ll use our template website by duplicating the entire database (plugins, images, and all) and simply moving it over to the new database in cPanel. The pro version of Duplicator makes this super easy and idiot-proof. It’s also a good solution for building a website on your host and then moving what you built over to your client’s host.
Stripe
We don’t believe there is a perfect payment processor out there for agencies to facilitate both project-based work and ever-changing monthly marketing invoices. However, after using multiple different payment processors and getting on sales calls with others, Stripe is by far the most accommodating to the agency model.
Hover (Domains)
Hover is where we purchase our domains. Most people are familiar with other brokers like NameCheap or GoDaddy. Hover has never led us astray. Anything that should be included at checkout is included and things we think are necessary like WHOIS privacy aren’t an additional line item. They also don’t do domain locks and just give the most flexibility when it comes to working with your domain.
