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🧰 From WordPress Mess to WordPress Success (with 3 apps)
Published 3 days ago • 6 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week: WordPress tools you need in 2026.
Believe it or not, WordPress still powers a huge chunk of the internet, and that’s not likely to change much in the next couple of years. But let’s be honest: building and managing a WordPress site can quickly turn into a time-draining mess of plugins, updates, and “quick fixes” that somehow eat your entire day.
This week, I’m sharing three tools that can seriously simplify your WordPress workflow, making website management less of a chore. We'll look at a tool that makes building beautiful pages a breeze, a handy plugin for those tricky database changes, and an AI assistant that can write code for you.
Plus: a surprisingly useful Google tool for managing your daily to-dos. A simple, yet effective, hack to free up space on your phone. And a plot twist that will make you think twice before jumping on the latest AI bandwagon.
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If you’re optimizing your workflows, automations, and daily systems, don’t overlook the engine that drives growth:
Youremail marketing.
You’ve probably heard email marketing is great for building trust and community - and even driving sales - but you haven’t quite managed to make it work for you.
With 15+ years’ experience, EmailTooltester is the go-to resource for all things email marketing - in fact, they showed me everything I needed to know to grow this newsletter!
f you’ve been saying to yourself “I really must put more effort into my email marketing”, now is the time. You’ll get expert advice on the best tools to use, the lead generation strategies working right now and practical walk-throughs, so you can start seeing actual results.
If you’ve ever felt intimidated by the thought of designing a WordPress site from scratch, Elementor may be for you (check our review). It’s a visual, drag-and-drop page builder that makes creating professional-looking websites surprisingly easy, no code required. My colleague Charlotte tested it recently, find below her findings.
What started as a simple page builder has evolved into much more with Elementor One. This new all-in-one subscription bundles most of what you’ll need: the site builder, image optimization tools, an accessibility extension, forms, pop-ups, and even an email marketing engine. And yes, they've sprinkled in some AI tools – from helping with writing copy to generating entire page layouts.
While the AI features are a cool addition for speeding up your workflow, remember that they’re not magic, even if at times it can feel that way. You’ll still need to guide them and tweak the results to get exactly what you want. Think of it as a very capable assistant, not a replacement for your own creativity.
Elementor is a serious alternative to consider for anyone who wants to build a professional-looking WordPress site without the headache.
🛠️ Alternative to: Divi, Beaver Builder, Hostinger
This one’s a bit on the geeky side, but trust me, when you need it, you’ll be glad you have it. Better Search Replace is a simple yet powerful plugin that lets you find and replace content throughout your entire WordPress database in just a few clicks.
With over a million active installations, it's a trusted tool for a reason. Imagine you need to update a brand name that changed from ‘CoolBrand’ to ‘Coolbrand’ across hundreds of pages. Or what if you move your site to a new domain and need to update all the mentions and possibly links? This plugin can handle it all automatically.
But with great power comes great responsibility. A wrong move with this plugin can cause havoc on your site, so proceed with caution. Always run a “dry run” first to see what will be changed, and for the love of all that is digital, make a full backup of your site before you hit that “run” button.
🛠️ Alternative to: Manual database queries, manual content changes
If you’ve ever wished you could just tell your computer what you want your website to do and have it magically write the code, well, we’re getting closer. OpenAI’s Codex is an AI model (and now desktop app) that translates natural language into code.
You can ask it to generate WordPress code snippets, write functions, or even help you debug your custom themes and plugins. It’s an incredible tool for developers looking to speed up their workflow, or for non-coders who want to make small customizations without hiring a developer.
The best approach for me was to:
Copy the live website to my computer
Give Codex access to the directory of my local site
Ask Codex to code away
Back up the live site (IMPORTANT)
Push the changes to my hosting service (with WP Migrate)
🛠️ Alternative to: Claude Code, Gemini CLI, hiring a developer
For years, I struggled to find the right tool for managing my daily tasks. For project management, I'm a big fan of ClickUp, and I still use Trello (mostly out of habit, but it's starting to feel a bit dated). But for the small, everyday to-dos, I needed something simpler.
Since I’m already deep in the Google ecosystem (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, you name it), I decided to give Google Tasks a try. And you know what? It’s brilliant in its simplicity.
Here are the three killer features for me:
It’s right there in my Gmail. One click and my task list appears right next to my inbox.
I can turn emails into tasks. No more snoozing emails to remind myself to follow up.
It syncs with my Google Calendar. I can assign due dates and see my tasks alongside my appointments.
It doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles, but that’s the point. It’s a simple, no-fuss task manager that integrates perfectly with the tools I already use every day. If you’re a Google user, you might already have the perfect to-do list app and not even know it.
🛠️ Alternative to: Apple Reminders, Todoist, Wunderlist
Instead of mindlessly scrolling through TikTok or Instagram when you have a spare moment, try this instead: go through your phone's photo library and start deleting.
I'm always shocked at how many blurry photos, accidental screenshots, and ridiculous memes from WhatsApp group chats are clogging up my phone and my iCloud storage. Taking a few minutes here and there to prune your photo library is a surprisingly satisfying way to reclaim space and feel a little more organized.
It's a small change, but it's a great way to be productive in those "in-between" moments – waiting for the bus, in line at the coffee shop, or, you know, toilet time after you ate questionable kebab 😂.
Plus, it’s a good excuse to put down the social media apps for a few minutes. Your brain (and your phone's storage) will thank you.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
A new AI tool called OpenClaw (it was called 2 other things before) recently took the internet by storm, promising to generate impressive results with just a few clicks. The hype was real, and I'll admit, I was tempted to jump in and try it out.
If you’re curious, it’s basically a super AI agent with dozens of third‑party tools and apps connected to it. For instance, it can access your computer, WhatsApp, email, and many more.
But then the story took a dark turn.
It turns out, this super AI tool had massive security flaws (source), leaking user data all over the internet. Security experts flagged it as a significant risk, yet many people continued to use it, lured by the promise of its impressive AI capabilities. Of course, they’re fixing those issues little by little, but when will it be truly safe?
This is a clear example that we don’t take online security seriously: it’s an app that has been downloaded thousands of times, even though there have been serious warnings from independent security experts about it.
Would you drive a car that automotive safety experts deemed unsafe? Probably not. So why are we so quick to ignore those same warnings when it comes to software?
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’re diving into the world of Knowledge Management. I'm obsessed with finding the perfect tool to organize my digital brain, and I think I'm finally getting somewhere.
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