One of the essentials that helps this site run smooth is deploying to neocities. This tutorial teaches you to connect your Visual Studio Code (which is the program I code in) to Github, and your Github account to Neocities. No more copy and pasting!
I use dithermark to dither... my marks...
If you use grid then this is very helpful to create your lay out. I personally like grid because I find it easier to make my pages mobile responsive with grid.
There's plenty of other helpful stuff that I used to build this site but I can't really think of them right now....