Introducing Wordfence Central Teams

Introducing Wordfence Central Teams

Last year, we introduced Wordfence Central and today thousands of WordPress site owners are using this free tool to manage their WordPress sites. Whether you’re using Wordfence Premium or still on the free plugin, Wordfence Central makes it possible for you to manage your sites’ security settings, tune your security alerts, and quickly assess security events all from one dashboard view.

With more businesses using these free features to manage their security alerts, we’re happy to announce another free feature: Wordfence Central Teams. Teams makes it possible to delegate access to your Central account by inviting trusted administrators onto your Team. Now, managing WordPress security across numerous sites is faster and easier than ever.

Why Wordfence Central Teams?

The core functionality of Wordfence Central makes managing more than one WordPress site easier. When you’ve got numerous team members managing site security, there can be numerous permutations of site management needs. Allowing a site to be managed by more than one individual as a part of a team not only makes managing numerous sites easier, but also improves account security. It is a security best practice to have individual logins rather than a shared login for authorization and accountability purposes.  Wordfence Central Teams improves upon security by providing individual logins for your site admins.

From one individual login, a Wordfence Central user can access multiple teams. This will make it easier for that user to get the security data they need to keep sites safe while also being able to configure Wordfence across numerous sites faster.

Getting Started with Wordfence Central Team Management

Site owners managing a number of sites can create a team and invite individuals to that team. There is no limit to the number of team members that can be on a Wordfence Central Team. An invitation is valid for 30 days from the initial invite, and a follow up email can be sent by the team owner/manager.

To get started, click on the account drop-down in the upper right, then click Team. Click Get Started under Start a Team. Choose a name for your Team and click Next. Once you’ve chosen a name for your team, it’s time to invite site managers. Just enter the email addresses of anyone you’d like to manage the sites in your Central account and click Send Invitation. An invitation email will be sent to the invited site manager(s), and Wordfence Central will list details about individual team membership.

Wordfence Central Teams Invitations and Members

If the invited person does not yet have a Wordfence Central account, they’ll be prompted to set up an individual account prior to accessing the sites within your team.

The team manager can revoke an individual’s Wordfence Central Team membership at any time. This won’t revoke the user’s access to a site’s wp-admin area. If that individual has access to a site’s administrative dashboard, you’ll need to revoke access there as well, if needed.

Joining a Wordfence Central Team

If you receive an invitation to join a Wordfence Central Team, click the link in the email to accept the invitation. You’ll be brought to the Wordfence Central dashboard where you can accept that invitation and access management of that team’s sites.

Wordfence Central Teams invitation email

An invited Wordfence Central user will have the same capabilities as the site owner for managing each site within the team including seeing security alerts, creating and applying templates to the individual sites, and configuring and tuning alerts for email, SMS, and Slack. They will not, however, have access to manage the overall team membership such as adding or removing team members, etc.

Accessing More than One Team

When you’re logged into your Wordfence Central account, you will have access to every team to which you’ve been granted access from that team’s manager, as well as capabilities to manage the team that you own.

Switching between the teams that you have access to is simple. By accessing the dropdown under “Account,” you have access to a list of all of the teams to which you have access.

Wordfence Central Teams Switching Account

You can also switch back to your own team and manage access to the team you’ve established.

Wordfence Central does not currently allow a team manager to create more than one team. However, each user can be a member of as many teams as they like, and users can join each other’s teams.

Wordfence Central is Free to Use

Wordfence has continuously made a commitment to providing many tools free of charge to the WordPress community, and Wordfence Central is no different. Whether your sites are secured by Wordfence Premium license or if you’re still using the free version, your WordPress development teams can utilize the features in Wordfence Central Teams without charge.

Many thanks to the Wordfence Premium customers who help fund continued development of new Wordfence features, Threat Intelligence, and education programs.

If You Haven’t Yet Tried Wordfence Central

If you have not yet gotten started with Wordfence Central, we invite you to try this free tool. To connect Wordfence Central to your WordPress site, just ensure Wordfence is installed. Authenticating to Wordfence Central is simple and easy. We have also developed demonstration videos to walk through the process.

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Comments

5 Comments
  • THANK YOU!!! This is a feature we have been wanting for a long time and are so happy to see it implemented!

  • This is really interesting, a smart development. A suggestion... there are likely many people out there like myself: site owners who recognize the importance of security and the value that Wordfence brings; but, we lack the time and harder core expertise to properly configure and administer Wordfence. Our actual expertise is more in authoring and editing.

    Utilization of Wordfence Teams to connect site owners with experts with genuine security expertise...this would be a high value service. Is this something that could be a part of Wordfence Premium, an extra tier?

    • Thanks for the feedback! We do have a couple of options for situations like you mention. First, all Wordfence Premium customers are entitled to premium support which gives you security expertise just an email away. And if you're looking for a deeper look at your site's overall security, check out our Site Security Audit. A security analyst will review approximately 60 security elements on your site and ensure that your site is secured and that Wordfence is configured and protecting. Details here: https://www.wordfence.com/site-security-audit/

  • Thank you so much, WordFence team!
    I'm happy with this possibility, but I think you can add a small feature to make it even more useful.
    Despite we can create many accounts and separate websites into them to create different Teams, with restricted access, it would be much easier if we could select which websites we are giving access to a specific Team.
    If this was possible, we can have a single dashboard and collaborate with different teams that will only have access to specific websites.
    Also, we would be able to filter our view to see the specific group of websites using the team's feature.

    • Thanks Alexandre. I'll pass this to the product team.