When you chose website development as your profession, you probably felt excited at first. However, the problem arises when you have to make all the projects from scratch. Writing code from scratch and then testing it, and putting it into production is a lot of work.
It’s not a job for one man, and it’s usually done by a team of people, and everyone is in charge of a particular segment. For example, you can handle the designing part, and a colleague of yours would be responsible for the Vue js development services.
Therefore, as a programmer, you need to be resourceful and find intelligent ways to solve any problems. Luckily, there are so many resources on the internet to help you develop websites and applications, but you need to put in the effort and time to find them.
This text will introduce you to tools that will help you be more efficient in project design and web application development. Moreover, many of these tools are free or have limited free versions, but you should give them a try.
1. WP Reset
Moreover, plugins that are installed and not used consume the resources of our hosting servers. We also risk creating a conflict between plugins that have the same purpose, which is why our pages may stop working. So, if many plugins have accumulated, then it takes a long time to delete them. Luckily, there is a solution to this problem, and it is called WP Reset.
WP Reset is a great WordPress plugin that allows you to delete most of the content on your WordPress pages in just a few clicks. If you want to delete plugins, themes, images or do a complete database, reset then WP Reset is the right plugin for you. Apart from the fact that you can delete most of the content on your pages by using this plugin, there are many other things that this plugin will make more accessible.
With this plugin, you can make a snapshot – a functional image of your website. If problems occur while testing plugins and the pages become non-functional, restore them from the snapshot with just a few clicks. As a result, in just a few minutes, you will have total functional pages.
In addition, many developers have a collection of plugins that they always use on any site. You no longer need to install plugins one by one. There is an option to create your plug-in collections within the WP Reset plugin, install and activate multiple plug-ins with just one click.
Also, if a white screen of death appears on your site, you have no reason to panic. The WP Reset plugin has a WP Reset Emergency Recovery Tool that does not depend on WP files and always works. It is an independent script that will provide you with access to the WP admin part of the page with the secure link, and after you gain administrator access, you can return the pages to a functional state.
After installing a new theme, we usually do import theme data. You can delete demo data with one click with this plugin and then fill the pages with your content. You can also place all snapshots and plugin collections in the cloud, so they will always be available and do not depend on your hosting servers.
Within this plugin, you have the option to administer a large number of portals from one central admin console. This way, you will save a lot of time because you do not have to log in to each portal individually. Furthermore, if you are an administrator on several websites, WP Reset will make your job easier.
We recommend this plugin to beginners and experienced users because WP Reset will always have functional websites. WP Reset is a commercial plugin, and you can download the limited version from the WordPress repository.
2. Sketch
Sketch is an excellent software for vector graphics. You can do user interface design for computers and mobile phones, prototypes as well as image editing. It has an excellent interface and is user-friendly so that you will master it very quickly and easily.
This software is used by several million users, such as freelance designers and designers working in some of the largest companies in the world. Inside Sketch is a section called Sketch for Teams, and its purpose is to enable collaboration with other team members with whom you can share the design, project and give comments and feedback.
One of the most important options is the ability to use materials created in Illustrator. Also, Sketch has predefined text and symbol styles and many libraries that you can use in any project. However, we must note that there is no support for using materials created in Adobe Photoshop.
As for customer support, you don’t have to send an email or try to contact support in any other way. There is a more straightforward solution: ask a question on Sketch Cloud, and at the same time, you can get all the critical feedback.
3. GTmetrix
As a developer, you will often need some of the tools to check your site’s performance. To this end, we will mention GTmetrix, one of the most popular website testing tools, which has many parameters that you can monitor. However, you may need to take more time to interpret all the parameters and decide how to increase the performance of your pages.
This popular service originated in Canada and was developed by GT.net. The first purpose of this tool was to monitor the websites of their hosting users and thus point out any problems and performance that need to be improved. This tool uses Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow to generate results.
GTmetrix is a commercial tool, but there is also a free version where you will get a lot of information about your websites. Moreover, when you run your website through GTmetrix, a report will be generated about your site, including GTmetrix grade and Web Vitals. Web Vitals is a standardized set of metrics created by Google, which consists of several different metrics, but those essential for GTmetrix are LCP, TBT, and CLS.
LCP represents the time it takes to load your website and measures the load time of the most significant element on your page. Usually, it is a picture, and it takes a lot of time to load. Next, TBT is the time in which a website is blocked before a visitor interacts with it. If you have unnecessary JavaScript or CSS blocking the display of pages, then you must correct it. Finally, CLS is the movement of certain elements on a web page as the web page loads.
In addition, GTmetrix will show you which part of your website is loading slowly and needs improvement. You can solve most of these problems using plugins for WordPress such as CDN Enabler for setting up KeyCDN, CAOS for synchronizing Google Analytics, Imagify, which is used for image compression. If you are a WordPress user, be sure to follow some of the online guidelines that will show you how to speed up your WordPress page.
4. Sprintly
Sprintly is an excellent service that makes it easier for teams, agencies, and companies to realize software development projects. It does not require any configuration or prior training; it is straightforward to use so that you can get started in just a few minutes.
Moreover, Sprintly is essential for managers to see what each team member is currently working on and the number of realized projects. Within this tool, you can see what the team is doing at any stage of software development.
There is an outstanding ability to search for items by various criteria such as date, tags, owner, stage of development, and many others. Team leaders can very easily find out who is overburdened and underused, and in this way, they can redirect tasks and optimize the use of people in the team.
So, if you have set goals, then within this service, you can track the progress on any project to get everything done on time. Also, Sprintly integrates well with GitHub.
5. GitHub
GitHub is probably the most well-known code hosting platform for collaboration and collaborative work on projects. It is possible for a larger team of people to work on projects no matter where they are currently located. The main benefit of the GitHub platform is the version control system that allows uninterrupted collaboration without compromising the integrity of the original project.
We can say that GitHub is the largest platform in the world that serves for software development and has support for absolutely all programming languages, storing code in the cloud and thus simplifies collaboration within teams.
Finally, GitHub is currently used by more than 65 million people, and there is a lot of published code from which you can learn a lot, which you can use in your projects.
Conclusion
Whether you are just developing a website or an experienced developer, you will always want to use services to make it easier for you to finish a project. Writing from scratch is complicated and takes a lot more time than you would spend with one of the services.
One of the main attributes of a good website or app is quality code, excellent design, and loading speed. In this text, we have described some of the tools that will help you raise the quality of your projects to a higher level.