How to Use the Wordfence WordPress Plugin to Secure Your Site

There are lots of free security plugins available for WordPress, but only a few of them are capable of delivering the exact performance you need. Wordfence Security is one of them. This immensely popular plugin has been downloaded more than 700,000 times and still remains an impressive rating of 4.9.
In today’s post, I will show you how to use the Wordfence WordPress plugin to secure your WordPress site. First of all, download, install and activate Wordfence Security in your website. The plugin will create a new menu item titled ‘Wordfence’ in your website dashboard.

Starting the Initial Scan

Go to Wordfence > Scan. Click the ‘Start a Wordfence Scan’ button. This will start the scanning process. You will get updates about the process in the ‘Scan Summary’ section. Each update will be accompanied by a status message. In the ‘Scan Detailed Activity’ section, you will find detailed information about the scanning process.

Live Traffic

By going to Wordfence > Live Traffic, you can check out the currently active traffic of your website. You will find detailed information including the browser name and version, location, time, IP address, etc. of each visitor. It is also possible to block an IP address from that page. You will also find separate lists of visitors like Humans, Registered Users, Crawlers, Top Consumers, etc.

Blocked IPs

If you want to block an IP address manually, you can do that from the Wordfence > Blocked IPs page. Just provide the IP address in the appropriate field and click ‘Manually block IP’. Additionally, you can lock out an IP address from logging in to your website. There are also options to clear all blocked IP addresses and clear all the locked out IP addresses. If you want more blocking options, go to Wordfence > Advanced Blocking.

On that page, you will find separate options to block IP addresses within a specific range, visitors coming from specific browsers and visitors coming from specific referrer sites. It is possible to provide a reason for the blocking. After providing the necessary details, click the ‘Block Visitors Matching this Pattern’ button to enable the blocking. Below, you will find a list of currently blocked ranges and patterns.

Performance Setup

In the Wordfence > Performance Setup page, you will find lots of options to improve the performance of your website. First of all, in the ‘Caching’ section, you can choose the Wordfence Falcon Engine caching, which claims to make your website 30 to 50 times faster.
In the ‘Cache Options’ section, you can allow SSL to be cached, clear cache when a scheduled post is published and add debugging data to the cached page sources. The ‘Cache Management’ section includes two buttons to clear cache and display cache details. And lastly, you can exclude specific things like URLs, browsers and cookies to be excluded from the cache.

Setting up Wordfence

The settings section of the plugin is located at Wordfence > Options. From the ‘Basic Options’ section, you can choose to enable firewall, live traffic view, login security, select the security level and choose how Wordfence gets IP addresses.
In the ‘Advanced Options’ section, you will find various options to customize the scan, alerts, live traffic view, firewall and login security. Lastly, there are separate fields to export or import Wordfence settings.

Whois Lookup

By using this page, you can check out the Whois details for any IP address or domain name. Just provide the IP address or domain name and the website URL in the field and click ‘Look up IP or Domain’. Within a few seconds, you will be provided with the available details.

Final Words

While options like Cellphone Sign-in, Country Blocking and Scan Schedule are available in the premium version only, you can still rely on Wordfence Security to provide basic security for your website.
So, are you using Wordfence in your website? If yes, please share your experience with us. And if you are using any other security plugin, let me know by leaving a comment below.