A common question WordPress users ask is how to handle website security, especially when the business starts to expand. If you already have kudos to give to basic Wordfence — the highly-rated security plugin for WordPress — then this Wordfence review will help you separate the wheat from the chaff about its essential premium aspects.

Wordfence is a free WordPress plugin that provides enterprise-level website protection against malware and hacks. Wordefence features a firewall and malware scanner, built specifically by Wordfence, to help protect your site and keep it safe. So you´re using the Wordfence plugin to secure your WordPress website and suddenly you were locked out. Probably you made the same mistake as I did and set the security level in the plugin options to “Level 4: Lockdown”, the name should be a warning but I selected level 4. Wordfence Premium Nulled includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that were built from the ground up to protect WordPress. Our Threat Defense Feed arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe. Rounded out by a suite of additional features, Wordfence Plugin Nulled. Wordfence currently protects over 4 million WordPress websites worldwide. Fueled by unparalleled threat intelligence, there is no better security solution for WordPress. With more than 180 million. Wordfence includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that were built from the ground up to protect WordPress. Our Threat Defense Feed arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe.

WordPress is the World’s Leading Publication Platform.

Over 450 million websites in the world use WordPress as their website platform. With 63.9% of the CMS market share, according to W3techs, it’s the world’ leading content publication platform.

WordPress (WP) is the favoured platform of corporations, small businesses, and individuals. Its diverse target audience is drawn by the simple CMS dashboard that allows for managing data, content, and e-commerce in the browser.

As an open-source platform, WP is open to customisation and continual user experience improvement for all types of SEO friendly web development, making it one of the most secure and user-friendly platforms. Security plugins abound, and the most popular of them is Wordfence.

Here’s a discussion of the pros and cons, and what some leading publications have to say about Wordfence.

Wordfence: The World’s Preferred Website Security Tool.

Wordfence is a WordPress security plugin that provides comprehensive protection against malicious code by deploying anti-virus, firewall and malware scan functionalities, including:

• WordPress Web Application Firewall (WAF)
• WordPress Security Scanner, and a
• Threat Defense Feed for real-time security updates.

Like many other WordPress plugins, Wordfence comes in a Free and a Premium version. Both have their benefits, however, if you are considering an intelligent IT support solution for a single complex, or multiple websites with volumes of precious data, then Wordfence premium is the safe and secure choice for you.

Advantages of Wordfence Free.

Don’t be misled, Wordfence’s “free” version still contains an immense amount of value created by a team of software developers and security analysts who enthusiastically work on improving plugins.

Wordfence tracks website security 24/7 and sends alerts via email to notify you of suspicious activity. Apart from the most obvious advantage — it comes at no cost — the basic version of Wordfence also provides:

• An endpoint firewall that doesn’t leak data, can’t be bypassed, and doesn’t break encryption.
• Brute force attack (password guessing) protection
• WAF (Web Application Firewall) Optimisation
• A suite of additional features you can customise according to your personal preferences
• 24-hour turnaround time for IT support requests (in most cases).

The crucial difference between Wordfence Free and Wordfence Pro is that the pro version comes with real-time support. That’s a big deal because in the world of IT security, failing to respond to a threat in real-time can cost hundreds of thousands in profits, months to repair the damage and a black mark on business reputation.

How to Guard Against Malicious Traffic with Wordfence Premium.

Here are the key added benefits of the paid version:

• Extra protection from four additional firewall rules and malware signatures you can activate according to website preferences
• Real-time IP blacklisting, including isolating IP addresses, as well as placing geographical restrictions, for example, particular country blocking for the whole site or the login page, and an option for redirecting or bypassing blocked users to a new URL. In this way, you can create more efficient sales funnels or get cleaner data about real prospects.
• Super-responsive team of security engineers that handle tickets within a few hours
• Central dashboard to follow Wordfence activity on multiple websites
• Price decrease for multiple Premium licenses

What the Industry Has to Say about Wordfence.

WordPress security experts work hard to monitor plugin performance and give feedback to enhance security plugins, including Wordfence. This plugin ranks high in WordPress security plugin reports because of:

1. Sophisticated IP-address Blocking.

Wordfence users get to see the source of the attack, the IP address, the time of the day the attack took place, and the time the attacker spent on your website, trying to break in. You can block the IP address permanently to prevent future attacks from the exact same source.Wordfence will also block addresses where the attacker performs an action that contravenes a given ruleset, like using a non-matching username to try to login.

2. Inclusive system for WordPress Core Security.

According to a G2 review, Wordfence’s advantages include fast website recovery warnings and fixing vulnerabilities in WP themes, plugins, and core. You can track and act upon theme and plugin updates with the active notification system. The Wordfence rate limiter is another benefit you can use to immediately block or control the number of fake Google crawlers and website visitors.

3. Advanced E-Commerce Protection.

Quick Sprout calls Wordfence “the front-door lock for your online store”. By providing a feature for distinguishing between bots, crawlers, and real visitors, Wordfence lets you establish control over website traffic and see where your hosting goes to waste. Two-factor authentication, the master security tool of modern browsers is available only in the premium version. If you’re selling online and have multiple API payment integrations, you could benefit from this extra layer of access protection.

4. Real-time Scanning and Firewall Rules.

What is meant by real-time? In the example of geographical blocking, Wordfence will block traffic from a designated no-go country in less than 1/300,000th of a second. In terms of IT support, real-time means reliance on a support team that is there for you as threats appear out of the blue. Compared to the free version, which comes with a 30-day delay of firewall rules, this is a massive supplemental benefit.

5. Custom Scanning on Self-Hosted Platforms.

Not to be the one to underestimate local vulnerabilities, Wordfence takes them as seriously as external issues. Users can customise the scan, including checking for more or fewer of the following scan options:

• Spamvertising
• Spam
• Server state
• File changes
• Malware scan
• Content safety
• Public files
• Password strength

Wordfence then classifies detected issues according to the severity and instigates action to mitigate them in order of priority.

Wordfence Issues to Consider Before Implementation.

Wordfence won’t be ideal for everyone. The plugin can conflict with some site performance enhancement plugins, as well as cause issues when migrating servers. Other Wordfence issues worth considering before installing are:

• Incompatibility with certain plugins, for instance, Elementor.
• May need to be disabled before site migration to prevent issues.
• Malware removal can be expensive and surpass the yearly license fee
• No mitigation against DDoS attacks; however, these are a tiny percentage of what usually endangers website security.

Speaking in the language of the three IT security pillars — i) prevention, ii) detection and response, and iii) recovery — Wordfence still has the most effective ratio for clearing the bad from the good traffic that comes to your website.

Getting the Best of Wordfence with Premium.

On the WordPress.org rating system, the plugin has a rating of 4.8 out of 5. The price is handy – $99 per year, per license. The price-to-value ratio improves when you purchase more licenses at once or when you buy them for several years upfront. It gets even better if you work in high-value industries such as healthcare, childcare, finance, or industrial automation. These industries work with sensitive personal records or extended supply chains that, if hacked, will ruin not only the attacked provider’s reputation but also result in costly damage claims or hurting people’s privacy, or, in the worst-case scenario, their health and safety.

In the IT support world, seconds are sufficient to break into the online presence of a business without good malware protection. Without a doubt, the high price of good security pays back multiple times its value when something bad happens. Conversely, when your user passwords have been leaked and abused by hackers, it is too late to mitigate a threat.

The level of real-time IT support provided by Wordfence employees is an advantage of the Premium version that cannot be understated.

Computer One is a multi-award-winning Managed IT Service Provider based in Australia. The company is a full-service provider, managing everything from an outsourced help desk to networks, cloud services, security and software development.

Related posts:

Wordfence is a free security plugin for WordPress. Security “plugins” for WordPress are often highly criticized as many may give a false sense of security or simply just automate creating .htaccess files – sometimes recklessly. However, Wordfence stands clear apart and above other plugins as it offers malware detection, checks for out-of-date plugins or themes, provides firewall throttling or blocking rules, has the ability to restore compromised or altered WordPress theme or plugin files, and offers an optional paid vulnerability scan from their data center. Those are just a few of the highlights which are to be touched upon below. Let’s dive in.

The Wordfence Scan

Wordfence functionality is based around a security scan the plugin performs. Out of the box, the plugin is ready to use and scan. Simply install and click Scan. The Wordfence Scan checks for the following issues:

Remote scan of public facing site [paid feature] Amjad sabri mp3 song.

Comparing core WordPress files against originals in repository

Comparing open source themes against WordPress.org originals

Comparing plugins against WordPress.org originals

Scanning for known malware files

Scanning file contents for infections and vulnerabilities

Scanning files for URLs in Google’s Safe Browsing List

Scanning posts for URL’s in Google’s Safe Browsing List

Scanning comments for URL’s in Google’s Safe Browsing List

Scanning for weak passwords

Scanning DNS for unauthorized changes

Scanning to check available disk space

Scanning for old themes, plugins and core files

Restore Modified or Possibly Compromised Plugin or Theme Files

The biggest feature of Wordfence is that it analyzes all core WordPress files, theme files, and plugin files for changes against the current available versions of those components. Users can click to repair/restore the original version of the file, view changes on screen, or ignore the finding. To avoid a customized theme from being flagged in this check, one should make use of WordPress child themes for theme changes.

Wordfence performs this by checking MD5 and SHA hashes of the installed files in a WordPress installation against a database of hashes of original files. The hashes are sent securely via 443 SSL to the Wordfence servers. This provides a quick and simple way to compare if files are different or have been modified for any reason, such as from malware or compromise.

Live Traffic

Wordfence offers an optional Live Traffic view. This runs via JavaScript that records its own analytics separate from any other logging. Information such as browser agent, IP address, geo-location, and the ability to click ‘block’ beside the IP makes this an invaluable feature. The only feature lacking is any ability to dump or export all of the traffic data to a CSV or XML file, which would be valuable.

Blocked IPs

Antoher feature in Wordfence is the ability to block an IP address from access to the WordPress site. Specific IP addresses can also be blocked from accessing the WordPress Login page to add security around the login area.

Note that Firewall and IP Blocking only prevent access to the WordPress site itself. This is not a replacement for a full operating system firewall, nor does it interact with iptables or other operating system level restrictions. Frankly, a WordPress plugin controlling an operating system firewall would probably be a bad idea. An example screen that is shown to a blocked IP is below.

Country Blocking

Scheduled Scanning

Two paid features are blocking entire geographical regions by geo-location as well as scheduled scanning. These add convenience but are not required for the full plugin functionality.

Wordfence Options

Once single Options page provides the entire configuration for Wordfence. Making changes here is completely optional, though users who want to make more changes under the hood will want to inspect this area.

Starting at the top, a drop down menu offers a quick security-hardening setting. In case the site is under attack or being the focus of abuse, the security level can be changed quickly here to various levels. Otherwise, each individual option can be set as shown below.

Advanced Options

Alerts

Wordfence.com

Various email alerts are possible from email alert when a user logs into the site, to emails about critical security problems found.

Live Traffic View

Here the Live Traffic View can be disabled if desired. I mention this as the only information leakage from the Wordfence plugin is the Live Traffic View javascript which is visible in the HTML source. (See screenshot below). It is still possible to block IP addresses with Live Traffic View disabled, though of course no fancy Live Traffic View would be available to see live traffic.

Scans to Include

In the Scans to Include section, it is best to enable two options that are not on by default to scan themes and plugins for changes. Often malware or another compromise will alter or change files on the server. These options let Wordfence check that all files in themes and plugins are of their originals and not compromised.

– Scan theme files against repository versions for changes

– Scan plugin files against repository versions for changes

Firewall Rules

Wordfence offers its own firewall to either throttle or block IP addresses based on various actions.

For instance, to avoid situations where the site may be flooded or DoS’d, enable the feature to throttle or block a connection after a large number of requests (32 per second). As previously mentioned, these rules only restrict access to the WordPress site itself, and have no effect on the operating system level Firewall.

Login Security Options

Wordfence Alternative

To add additional security around the WordPress login, Wordfence offers many good features. After X number of bad login attempts, the IP can be blocked. The more fascinating feature offered here is Don’t let WordPress reveal valid users in login errors. Many WordPress hacks based around the login page are from information leakage where WordPress confirms valid usernames at the login page.

While these are great features to add security around the login, the best security is to prevent access to the WordPress login page entirely by Apache server authentication if at all possible.

Other Options

In the final section Other Options, specify a home or work IP address in the whitelist so Wordfence does not block or limit valid connections from valid WordPress administrators.

Wordfence Premium

If the option to Participate in the Wordfence Security Network is selected, IP addresses that have violated login or firewall rules are sent to Wordfence to help in a global block list for other users. If desired, disable this option for privacy reasons.

Effectiveness and Conclusions

Wordfence offers extremely easy deployment of added security layers to WordPress. The highly customized options make Wordfence a good choice for one who perhaps is not interested in the Firewall, but only want to audit code changes. The Firewall can be disabled, and only code changes can be scanned, as one example. Wordfence has a large user community on their forums ( http://www.wordfence.com/forums ) and offers support for paid users. A negative often spoken of security plugins is that they often only automate or change what one could change for themselves anyway. But here Wordfence’s code auditing, firewall with throttling options, malware detection, and other features are a bit far from what one could do themselves or at least not without quite a bit of effort. Wordfence operates in large part with its cloud servers located in Seattle, Washington who play a large part in the code auditing and IP block lists correlation, as well as perform scanning for paid users.

Wordfence Mfa

Of all of the various security plugins for WordPress, Wordfence provides unique layered security options with an extremely easy-to-use interface. Check it out at http://www.wordfence.com.