Resources
Stuff we use, stuff we recommend
How does Fortifli provide professional services to your website?
Below is a list of software, tools and services we love, some may surprise you.
Plugins
This suite of plugins are provided to assist you with your choice of plugins. As a Fortifli customer, you receive all WPMUDev Pro versions as well as WP Rocket for free, on any of our care plans.
This saves you well over $500USD per year.
Superior speed optimisation with these top tier plugins
Made by: WP Media
Product Link: WP Rocket
Free version: No (14 day money back guarantee)
Function: WordPress performance optimisation
What does it do?
WP Rocket is WordPress speed optimisation plugin, which provides fast caching of your content and also optimises delivery of certain web assets such as Javascript, CSS and more.
Why do we like it?
WP Rocket does not have a free version but is well worth the cost, with Fortifli you will get access to the plugin for free. Our testing showed that it is simply one of the best WordPress performance plugins with its ease of use, performance testing and granularity making it stand out.
This software will walk you through a wizard to find and optimise just about every part of your site from javascript execution delay, page compression & static page generation.
Made by: WPMUDev
Product Link: Hummingbird Pro
Free version: Yes, here
Function: WordPress performance optimisation
What does it do?
Hummingbird has a free version, with limited functionality, however with Fortifli you will get the full Pro version. Our testing showed that it is simply one of the best WordPress performance plugins with its ease of use, performance testing and granularity making it stand out.
Why do we like it?
With Hummingbird, our testing showed that it is simply one of the best WordPress performance plugins with its ease of use, performance testing and granularity making it stand out.
This software will take you through a simple wizard, scan all the files associated with your website, CSS, Javascript etc and will choose the best way to optimise it for you.
Other awesome bits
Made by: WPMUDev
Product Link: Defender Pro
Free version: Yes, here
Function: Security Web Application Firewall (WAF)
What does it do?
Defender Pro is WordPress firewall plugin which helps to protect your website, blocking bad actors, checks your WordPress site for malware.
Why do we like it?
Defender Pro is a very formiddable piece of software, coupled with Cloudflare protection it can protect your site from brute force attacks, malware installation. Comes complete with 2FA protection for your admins and or website members.
Upon installation the very easy to use wizard will guide you through various options and provides many suggestions to help lock down your website from bad actors, things like enforcing 2 factor authentication (2FA) which is definitely a good idea for any accounts with admin priveleges, suggests changes the overall configuration – this will set your beloved site with a good foundation for security, covering more than the basics.
Smush Pro
Made by: WPMUDev
Product Link: Smush Pro
Free version: Yes, here
Function: WordPress image optimisation
What does it do?
Smush from WPMUDev scans and optmises your WordPress media library. You can “bulk smush” all the existing images, after choosing the desired compression method and generate smaller images, whilst leaving your original image alone (if you wish).
Why do we like it?
For most sites, the images are the single largest part of any page. By Smushing them, as far as the visitor is concerned will have no or very minimal effect on the quality, whilst reducing the whole page size, for all the posts and pages on your site.
A smaller page, means faster speeds for all of your visitors and as you know, the faster the better. Slow loading pages on any site can see high numbers of visitors simply giving up and going elsewhere…. Now that’s not what we want, is it?!
Snapshot Pro
Made by: WPMUDev
Product Link: Snapshot Pro
Free version: No
Function: Site Backup
What does it do?
Snapshot Pro is WordPress site backup plugin that creates copies of your site to various destinations, including WPMUDev’s own cloud service.
Why do we like it?
Snapshot Pro is an excellent backup solution. At Fortifli fortunately we rarely need to use it as our servers perform a daily backup, storted locally on the server which is faster than using a remote cloud service.
As with all backup solutions, the more copies you have, the more options you have to recover your site in case of a failure, malware injection or maybe you just had a little Ooops! moment and broke something ;-).
Upon installation the very easy to use wizard will guide you through various options including which destinations you would like the backups to go to. Currently the options are WPMUDev’s cloud service with both USA or EU hosted options or you can use your own Amazon S3 account, Dropbox, Microsoft Onedrive, Google Drive or simply an FTP/SFTP service.
You choose a period, daily, monthly and a time to kick it off and the software will kick it off for you at that time automatically. You can restore partially, such as images, templates etc or perform a full site restore.
Snapshot Pro is a very solid product, complete with both WordPress and WPMUDev hub integrations and will help you recover in those rare, but important times when you need it.
Forminator Pro
Made by: WPMUDev
Product Link: Forminator Pro
Free version: Yes, here
Function: Web Form Builder
What does it do?
Forminator Pro is WordPress webform builder which is extremely powerful, integrates with many third party services and is highly modifiable for any of your web form needs.
Why do we like it?
You can see Forminator at several stages on our site, we rely on it a lot! Whether you need a simple contact us form, payment process, online quiz or just about anything you can think of.
Use our Contact Us form? It’s Forminator, our services form, Forminator, internal Support Request form, yes, Forminator again!
You can also use Forminator for online bookings, course enrollment – all with base templates included.
You can also hook it into Stripe and / or Paypal to accept payments, even subscriptions (Pro version required).
SmartCrawl Pro
Made by: WPMUDev
Product Link: SmartCrawl Pro
Free version: Yes, here
Function: On site SEO
What does it do?
SmartCrawl Pro is WordPress SEO plugin which us very much like the very popular Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
Why do we like it?
Snapshot Pro is an excellent backup solution. At Fortifli fortunately we rarely need to use it as our servers perform a daily backup, storted locally on the server which is faster than using a remote cloud service.
As with all backup solutions, the more copies you have, the more options you have to recover your site in case of a failure, malware injection or maybe you just had a little Ooops! moment and broke something ;-).
Upon installation the very easy to use wizard will guide you through various options including which destinations you would like the backups to go to. Currently the options are WPMUDev’s cloud service with both USA or EU hosted options or you can use your own Amazon S3 account, Dropbox, Microsoft Onedrive, Google Drive or simply an FTP/SFTP service.
You choose a period, daily, monthly and a time to kick it off and the software will kick it off for you at that time automatically. You can restore partially, such as images, templates etc or perform a full site restore.
Snapshot Pro is a very solid product, complete with both WordPress and WPMUDev hub integrations and will help you recover in those rare, but important times when you need it.
Hustle Pro
Made by: WPMUDev
Product Link: Hustle Pro
Free version: Yes, here
Function: Marketing Tool
What does it do?
Originally touted as a Pop-in, Slide-in generator, Hustle Pro is so much more! Sure it create marketing popups, mostly used for newsletter or promotional email list building and for products. However you can also create triggers for various actions taken on your site and Hustle can automate just about all of it.
Why do we like it?
We have found Hustle Pro to be a very useful tool for tracking conversions, email subscriptions and several kinds of action events.
The automation and reports from Hustle is simply awesome. We use it heavily for email marketing, lead generation & optin management.
We enjoy using the reporting and statistics it provides, as far as email campaigns, analytics and reporting goes it’s basically a complete marketing dashboard right within your WordPress site.
Beehive Pro
Made by: WPMUDev
Product Link: Beehive Pro
Free version: Yes, here
Function: Web Analytics
What does it do?
First and formost Beehive is to display your Google Analytics stats right within your dashboard, but it does a lot more too.
Why do we like it?
It is definitely one of the easist methods to connect your GA4 via a connection wizard, we all know how much of a hassle this can be, Beehive makes it much simpler, just follow the wizard prompts and you’re off to the races.
We enjoy other functions as well. If you have multiple administrators, designers, content creators on your site, this plugin allows you to control exactly who can see your site’s analytics in the WP dashboard.
Beehive Pro also handles your GTM Tag management.
Data privacy is also handled with is very good for GDPR, PECR (and all the various ones around the world) compliance including ip address anonymisation and optional cookie notifications.
A very solid plugin for those who like to see all those lovely stats climbing without leaving the WordPress dashboard. Not bad.
Services we like
WPMUDev
WPMUDEV was founded in 2009 by Zachary Schuessler and Justin Tollefson. At the time, they started out as a small team of developers focused on creating premium WordPress plugins and themes.
Over the years, WPMUDEV has grown significantly, expanding its product line to include more than 50 premium plugins and themes, as well as providing various services such as consulting, support, and training for businesses and individuals looking to build or improve their online presence using WordPress.
Today, WPMUDEV is considered one of the most respected names in the WordPress development community, with a strong reputation for delivering high-quality products and exceptional customer service.
WPMUDev provides several plugins to help with the Performance, Security, Branding, Analytics and much more which is detailed further down this page.
Fortifli has been using WPUDev services and software for over 10 years and became a partner in 2023, that’s how much we like them :-).
Cloudflare
At the edge of the internet, Cloudflare protects your online presence with its comprehensive security suite. Their Edge Security Services use a network of over 200 data centers worldwide to detect and block malicious traffic before it reaches your infrastructure. With
Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF), you can shield your website from common web attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Plus, our DNS (Domain Name System) and SSL/TLS encryption ensure that all data in transit remains secure and private.
But security is just the beginning.
Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps deliver your online content quickly and reliably to users around the world. By caching frequently accessed resources at edge locations, Cloudflare reduces latency and minimizes the load on your origin server. This results in faster page loads, improved user experience, and increased conversions.
With their CDN, you can also optimize image and video delivery, reduce bandwidth costs, and enable real-time analytics and logging. Whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise, Cloudflare’s Edge Security and CDN services help you keep your online presence secure, fast, and always available.
Tools we can't live without
Linux
Made by: Linux
Product Link: Linux.org (countless flavours)
Free version: Most are 100% Free (GPL).
Function: Operating System
What does it do?
Linux is an open source operating system, which powers most of the web. The core of Linux is the kernel which was a project started by Linus Torvalds, the Linux OG.
The particular distribution used on our hosting is Alma Linux. There are countless distributions of Linux and also other Non-Linux but unix-like operating systems powering servers, desktops, IoT devices.
There is a 99% chance your home WiFi router is running linux, same as an Amazon FireTV, if you have an Android phone? Linux. Linux, Linux, everywhere Linux.
Why do we like it?
Linux is everywhere and this list simply would be incomplete without mentioning the very OS that powers Fortifli hosting and most hosting really.
Linux is a very powerful operating system which can be tweaked and modified to a very low level, unlike *cough* Windows. The suite of utilities, software (much of it 100% free) is literally not able to be counted, all supported by developer communities making Linux and Linux based apps better and better.
Matomo (formerly known as Piwik)
Made by: Matomo
Product Link: Matomo Analytics
Free version: 100% Free (GPL)
Function: Web Analytics
What does it do?
Matomo is an a website analytics platform, known mostly for it’s privacy and simpler tracking features. Remember Google Analytics before it became massively complicated to the point where you don’t even know what you’re measuring anymore?
Matomo is just that, simple, actionable insights into your website traffic.
Why do we like it?
Fortifli runs a service on Trusted Stats which you will get access to as a client.
Fail2Ban
Made by: Fail2Ban
Product Link: Fail2ban.org
Free version: 100% Free (GPL)
Function: Dynamic Firewall
What does it do?
Fail2ban is simply the most durable, strong and just plain awesome dynamic firewall for Linux. We have depended on this since 2012 and have customised it so that it hooks into cloudflare and constantly review web logs and adjust it to protect our client’s websites from nasty attackers, vulnerability scanners, brute force login attempts, comment spammers and aggressive scraping bots.
It works by continually monitoring the webservers log files, looking for text patterns which indicate the that the request is something we don’t want, then it bans the the ip address for a certain amount of time, before automatically allowing it again. If said attacker tries again, then the ban time is dynamically increased to prevent repeated attempts from occuring.
Why do we like it?
We take security *very* seriously and Fail2ban is one of our absolute fave tools to protect our systems. Combine Fail2ban with Cloudflare and you have covered at least 80% of nasty behaviour. If one website sees one of these nasty bots, our system will not only ban it for that website, but all websites hosted with us. Very powerful.
That's not all folks.....
While this list is hardly short, there’s a whole bunch more that we use and do to protect your websites
Interested in having actual experts looking after your site? Be sure to reach out to us for a chat.