Wordfence is one of the most popular firewall and malware scan for WordPress. The fact that WordPress is the leading open-source CMS in the world, it is usually one of the most targeted by hackers. Hackers can harm your WordPress site through a number of ways. Stolen passwords and theme code errors are the most common possibilities. However, hackers can also perform some exploits on your WordPress installation. To make your website secure and remove all the security threats, you need a firewall and malware scan plugin for WordPress. Wordfence is one such popular plugin for these purposes. Have you been hacked? Do not worry. This WordPress plugin review will show you why you need a security plugin and what Wordfence can do to help your situation.
1. Why Use Wordfence Plugin for WordPress
There are too many WordPress security plugins in the market today. It is therefore difficult to decide which one is the best for your site. Unfortunately, not all provide powerful security options for your site. To make this easier for you at the outset, Wordfence is the best and most popular security and malware scanner plugin for your website. It provides a powerful endpoint malware scanner built purposely for WordPress. The plugin uses Threat Defense Feed to provide the latest firewall rules, malicious IP addresses, and malware signatures to ensure your website remains secure. Out-of-the-box, Wordfence comes with important features that make it the most comprehensive security solution for your WordPress installation and site.
The fact that Wordfence runs at the endpoint (on your server), makes it better compared to cloud security alternatives. Unlike cloud firewalls, Wordfence cannot be bypassed. The plugin also does not break end-to-end encryption like what happens with cloud firewall solutions. In this way, the plugin uses firewall rules that do not screen out legit users.
2. Installing and Configuring Wordfence
It is easy to add Wordfence to your WordPress site.This is by going to the “Add Plugins” section of your backend. Typing “Wordfence” will yield what you are looking for from the official WordPress plugin repository. You can also go straight to the plugin’s official site and download the Wordfence Premium version.
Once installed (and activated), the plugin becomes available on your dashboard. The plugin will give you a lot of settings to choose from. Among the settings that will become available are scan, firewall, and blocking options. The plugin will give you an option to check your site for signs of intrusion and attacks as well as giving you the capability to prevent future infringements. If your site has suffered file infections or modifications (any breaches), the plugin will give you an option to rectify and correct this.
The plugin needs to be configured to reflect your website security needs. Do this by going to the “All Options” menu. Here, you can customize your firewall, scanning, and blocking options. All this is done by ticking the boxes against the options available. Remember that some options will only be available when using the premium version of the plugin.
3. Wordfence Features
Wordfence has powerful security features for your website. This is because it comes loaded with the following tools and capabilities;
- WordPress firewall. The Wordfence plugin comes with a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that spots and blocks malicious web traffic. Running at the endpoint, this firewall integrates perfectly with WordPress. This is because the firewall cannot be bypassed, cannot break encryption or leak any data.
- The plugin also provides additional security layer by limiting login attempts (brute force attacks). It also enforces strong passwords by ensuring that users provide passwords with suitable length and other parameters. The premium version of the plugin adds the ability for real-time updates for firewall rules and malware signatures. It also offers IP blacklists in real-time so that your site is protected from the most malicious and spamming IPs.
- Security scanner. Wordfence provides a scanner that checks your website themes, core files, and plugins for security issues. These elements include malware, backdoors, malicious URLs and redirects, code injections and SEO spam among others.
- The plugin also compares what is in your website against that which is in the official WordPress repository. After this,the plugin detects the integrity of the plugins and themes and report that to you. If these are any modifications, you can fix that. For this reason, you can repair your files by overwriting them using the original clean ones from the repository.
- Checks your site for security vulnerabilities and abandoned, discontinued, and not-updated plugins.
- The plugin also checks your content for any malicious URLs or any other compromised content.
Other Features
The plugin also has other additional powerful features:
- Leaked password protection.
- Country blocking.
- Advanced manual blocking.
- Two-factor authentication.
- Live traffic monitoring.
4. WordPress Pros and Cons
Pros
- Ability to block fake search engine crawlers and allow unlimited access for verified and trusted Google and other search engine crawlers.
- Real-time features to monitor traffic and other important web security elements.
- Numerous options that provides capability to take comprehensive security measures.
- Ability to block countries and other huge geographic areas in addition to IPs.
- Good support.
- Easy to install and configure.
- Ability to scan files located outside your WordPress installation.
Cons
- No real-time updates of the latest security threats and malware signatures on the free version of Wordfence. You need the Premium version to make sure that your site is not attacked by zero-day malware.
- Numerous security options some of which can be provided by already existing plugins.
- The WAF section is sensitive and can lead to unintentional lockouts when used by newbies.
- Wordfence has a price of $99 per year and site. A bit expensive in comparison with other plugins.
5. Verdict
Wordfence is a valuable firewall and malware scan plugin for WordPress. Although there are other comparable plugins such as Sucuri, (that provides a better user-interface and simpler security options) iThemes and Sitelock, Wordfence has a clean dashboard. The dashboard provides a glance overview of the security of your site. Even without the real-time update capability, the brute force prevention keeps the malicious intruders at bay.
