Cloudflare
A global CDN, DNS and WAF that sits in front of your site.
Why: Caching, DDoS protection and a WAF I reach for on almost every performance and hardening job.
Visit ↗Recommended Stack
Recommended Tools
Some links on this page may be affiliate links. If you use them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools that fit my WordPress development workflow.
LocalWP
A local WordPress development environment.
Why: Fast, clean local sites for building and testing safely off production.
Visit ↗Query Monitor
A developer debugging panel for queries, hooks, HTTP calls and performance.
Why: My go-to for diagnosing slow queries and bottlenecks before touching anything.
Visit ↗UpdraftPlus
Scheduled WordPress backups to remote storage.
Why: Reliable, restorable backups — the thing every site needs before anything else.
Visit ↗UptimeRobot
Monitors your site and alerts you when it goes down.
Why: Simple, dependable uptime alerts so you hear about downtime before your clients do.
Visit ↗Vercel
A deployment platform for Next.js frontends.
Why: Where I deploy Next.js frontends for headless WordPress builds — fast, with ISR support.
Visit ↗Wordfence
A WordPress firewall and malware scanner.
Why: A solid first layer for monitoring and blocking during and after a cleanup.
Visit ↗WP Mail SMTP
Routes WordPress email through a proper SMTP/API sender so contact forms actually land in the inbox.
Why: The fix for the classic "form submits but no email arrives" problem.
Visit ↗