Custom Plugin — £3,600+/yr in Licence Savings

The commercial plugin being used to protect 11+ B2B client portals cost £330 per site per year. Beyond the cost, it had significant limitations: no master password for staff access, no branding customisation, sessions that didn't persist across the multisite network, and no per-site admin controls.

A custom plugin was built to replace it entirely. Built to WordPress coding standards with a full OOP architecture, it included branded login screens per portal (custom logo, background, login text), a network-wide master password for internal staff, HMAC-SHA256 cookie authentication, brute-force protection with rate limiting (10 failed attempts triggers a 15-minute IP lockout), automatic noindex/nofollow headers to keep portals out of search engines, and per-site admin controls accessible from within WordPress.

The plugin was deployed across all 12+ portals, tested in every scenario, and has been running in production with zero ongoing licence cost. The annual saving exceeds £3,600 and the functionality is more suitable for the specific use case than the commercial product it replaced.