These tools that make life easier for independent developers

Online payment, e-mail management, internal search engine, multilingual site … all features that can explode the price of a website. Unless you turn to easily integrable solutions. Here is our selection of tools to lower the bill and save time.

Most developers and freelance web designers often find themselves in a delicate situation, where the customer wants to add many features to his site, but for a budget obviously limited, for which it is difficult to work miracles. Fortunately, “turnkey” solutions exist to save you expensive specific developments.

Stripe: Deploy an online payment solution at any site

Many customers want to develop their own e-commerce site. In this regard, CMS (content management tools) are numerous: Prestashop, Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, to name only the best known. If some of these solutions include payment intermediaries, others will need a third-party service to manage the transactions.

This is where Stripe comes in. In a few years, the company has become the reference in the field of online payment. Its main advantage over other services (especially those offered by traditional banks) is its easy integration to all types of sites, including “tailor-made” websites.

With Stripe, you have the possibility to offer your customers a tunnel of sale by credit card. Several levels of integration are possible, from the simplest to deploy (the “Checkout” module, allowing the implementation of a simple payment form), to the most personalized (using the API of the platform). The customization options are almost unlimited and adapt to all business models: management of one-time or recurring payments (subscription), discount coupons, invoice management, etc.

Stripe is paid by a commission charged on each transaction (variable depending on the type of card), with a fixed amount on each transaction: 1.4% + 0.25 € for European cards and 2.9% + 0 , 25 € for other cards.

Sendgrid: simplify the management of transactional and marketing emails

Email marketing has become unavoidable. So much so that customers now want to have an integrated solution to their site, to manage their e-mailing campaigns, mailing lists and even transactional emails (in synergy with the CMS of their site). As far as e-mailing is concerned, “DIY” solutions are often the source of many frustrations … Especially when the e-mails sent always land in the “Spam” folder of the recipients.

To avoid having to worry about the deliverability of emails, the Sendgrid platform – well known to developers and marketers – proposes to support the entire process of sending messages, ensuring that the conditions are met. fulfilled to obtain a good opening rate. The service is positioned between your client’s website and the recipients. Note: Sendgrid also offers a tool for creating online newsletters, based on customizable templates.

Sendgrid offers two offers (cumulative): “E-mail API” for transactional e-mails (personalized and contextual messages sent automatically) and “Marketing campaigns”, intended to cover the mass mailings of your customers. Be aware that a free version is available to discover the service, it includes 40,000 emails for the first 30 days, then 100 emails a day.

Algolia: offer a powerful and fast internal search engine

The most used CMS (including WordPress), propose an internal search engine very practical but which is often very limited in term of relevance. Certainly, plugins are available to extend the search features but these are often difficult to set up and the results may be disappointing. However, a good internal search engine is an important source of conversions, especially for a commercial site.

The startup Algolia (created in France, which does not spoil anything) offers a powerful research tool, based on outsourced processing. In other words, with each request, everything happens on the servers of Algolia which ensure the indexing and the classification of the results. The tool makes it possible to make predictive suggestions to the user, with extreme speed.

Algolia offers extensions designed for Magento and Shopify CMSs. Of course, an API is also available to have your client’s website talk to their platform, regardless of the technology used for its development. The first formula starts at a price of $ 35 a month.

Weglot: internationalize your customer’s site in record time

Deploying a multilingual website is never easy. Whatever the project, internationalization is an inexhaustible source of effort that often results in a budget that explodes! On the menu of tasks to be planned: technical adaptation of the platform (whether by specific developments or the implementation of plugins dedicated to multilingual management), translations of the interface and content, multiple proofreading and corrections, etc.

Unless you opt for Weglot: a simple machine translation tool (also made in France!) That will be responsible for “scanning” your client’s site and proposing (after integration of a few lines of code) translated versions in the languages ​​you want. It’s as simple as that, and it’s also customizable. Weglot offers a first set of default translations that you can modify as you wish (and in context).

The tool interfaces with the majority of CMS and frameworks: WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Jimdo, Drupal, Laravel, Symfony, Squarespare. And even for a site 100% made-to-measure, an integration in JavaScript is possible. In total, more than 100 languages ​​are available.

Rates start at € 8.25 per month (if annual payment) for an additional language and 10,000 words. And to try the service, a 10-day trial period (no commitment) is available. To note: a counter of words is present on the site to estimate at best the needs of your customer