The Essential 3rd Party Services Checklist

When creating a website from scratch, we usually have the luxury to recommend our clients what services to use. If the stars align, we get to set up things the way we like it and the way we believe it’s the best for our clients. Here’s our list of must haves. This is not a sponsored post.

Amazon S3 is an industry standard. It’s fast, it’s reliable and you pay as you go. What else do you need?

Heroku provides a platform as a service, which means we don’t have to deal with server administration. It might look expensive at a first glance, but actually it’s kind of cheaper. The whole service scales effortlessly and developers love it.

We used to vouch for Mandrill, but after experiencing some problems with their support and a super rigid view on GDPR policies, we turned to Mailgun. We are really happy so far.

I guess Google Analytics needs no introduction, everyone should use it. Crazy Egg is reasonably priced, offers a wide variety of tools and simple enough for anyone to get started.

We used to create custom comments modules, but not anymore. Disqus offers a free plan that will suffice for smaller websites, but their paid plans are also totally affordable. Disqus is quite popular, so people probably have an account and the interface will be familiar.

Dealing with a high volume of images can lead to big bills and a terrible user experience. Imgix is an image processing proxy, which means you don’t have to store different image versions with their solution. This reduces storage costs and loading times.

There are many payment processors out there and frankly most of them are great. We pick Stripe because they offer friendy fees and a nice interface.

Drift is so easy to set up. Everybody should try it once, just for the onboarding experience.

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