Firewall Options

Change the firewall status mode, optimize the firewall and configure advanced options.

Basic Options

Firewall Mode

The Wordfence firewall status can be either set to “Enabled and Protecting”, in “Learning Mode” or “Disabled”. When you first install Wordfence, the firewall will be in Learning mode for one week. During this time you will not have full protection from the firewall. The firewall will instead be learning how your system works in order to minimize “false positives”. A false positive is when something gets blocked that you did not want to be blocked. If you have recently cleaned your site from a hack, or if you are under attack, you can choose to set the Firewall status to “Enabled and Protecting” instantly after installing Wordfence. The modes of the Firewall are:

Enabled and Protecting In this mode, the firewall is actively blocking requests matching known attack patterns and is actively protecting your site from attackers.
Learning Mode In this mode, any requests that would normally be blocked by the firewall will be added to the firewall allowlist. Some requests contain data that may match patterns the firewall uses to detect attacks (such as an article about SQL injection that contains SQL code). While in Learning Mode, these requests will be added to the firewall allowlist, excluding them from tripping the same rules once the firewall is enabled. Use this mode to prevent false positives on your site. [More about Learning Mode]
Disabled In this mode, the firewall is functionally turned off and does not run any of its rules or analyze the request in any way.

Protection Level

The firewall “Protection Level” can be set to either “Basic WordPress Protection” or “Extended Protection”. If the firewall has been optimized, it will provide an extra layer of security and also improve firewall performance. Learn how to optimize the Firewall.

Real-Time IP Blocklist

Wordfence monitors millions of attacks on WordPress sites every hour. This data is used to automatically generate a list of IP addresses that are currently involved in bad behavior. The premium Real-Time IP Blocklist feature prevents known attackers from accessing your site. All of this happens automatically without you having to take any action. The IP addresses are blocked by the firewall, so if your site has been set up with the firewall in “Extended Protection” mode then this traffic is blocked before WordPress begins loading. The Real-Time IP Blocklist is a premium feature and has no effect when using the free version of Wordfence. Learn more about the IP Blocklist.

Advanced Options

Delay IP and Country blocking until after WordPress and plugins have loaded

When the Wordfence firewall is optimized, the firewall loads before the WordPress environment loads. This is desired behavior, as it increases security and gives the firewall a performance boost. But if your server has a conflict with blocking by IP address, country, or other advanced blocking settings before WordPress has loaded, you can turn on this option to allow WordPress to load first. We do not recommend enabling this option except for testing purposes.

Allowlisted IP addresses that bypass all rules

If you have a static IP address in an office or on a permanent internet connection and you want to configure Wordfence to always allow that IP address to bypass any rules, then you can enable this option.

Please note that this feature is often misunderstood, and we have site administrators who try to add their home IP address on a broadband connection to the IP address allowlist. Your broadband IP address is not a permanent IP address because it is dynamically assigned and will change after several weeks or months, or sometimes over a shorter period. So we do not recommend that you add your home Internet connection’s IP address if you are using ADSL or cable modem to the IP allowlist because your IP will inevitably change after a time, making this addition ineffective and potentially causing whoever is assigned the IP address after you lose it to have unlimited access to your website. Only use this feature if you are sure you have a permanent IP address. Most people do not.

You can add whole networks to the allowlist if needed (Bing search engine, for example). To enter these, you need to input them in the xxx.xxx.xxx.[x-x] format. This page can help you translate CIDR formats to ranges:

http://www.ipaddressguide.com/cidr

Examples:

  • 65.52.104.0/24 would be entered as 65.52.104.[0-255]
  • The IPv6 range 2a03:2880:f001::/48 would be entered as 2a03:2880:f001:[0-ffff]:[0-ffff]:[0-ffff]:[0-ffff]:[0-ffff]

Allowlisted Services

To avoid unintentional blocking of some external services such as Facebook, Wordfence allows these services. For example, if you have strict Rate Limiting rules, Facebook’s crawler might get blocked or throttled if it requests pages too quickly. This could happen when someone shares links to several pages on your site at once.

The services are allowlisted by default. You can disable allowing of any specific service by disabling its corresponding checkbox in the option “Allowlisted Services”. When a service’s checkbox is disabled, it will be treated the same way as any other visitor.

If you try to manually block an IP address that belongs to an allowlisted service, you will see a message saying “This IP address is in a range of addresses that Wordfence does not block. The IP range may be internal or belong to a service that is always allowed. Allowlisting of external services can be disabled”. If you are certain that you want to block an IP belonging to an allowlisted service, you must first disable the allowed service as described above.

Immediately block IPs that access these URLs

This allows you to set a trap for bad guys. You can enter a URL that does not exist, for example:

/example-one

If anyone tries to access that URL, they are instantly blocked. You have to specify a relative URL starting with a forward slash, and URLs are case-sensitive. Wildcards (*) can be used, if there are visits to multiple bad URLs. For example, if there are visits to:

/example-two

/example-three

Then entering the wildcard below will block both of the URLs above:

/example-*

If you are using WordPress Multisite, wildcards (*) can be used before a URL to match requests on all mapped domains in the Multisite. For example:

*/example-one

Will match the following URLs below if those are both sites in the same Multisite where Wordfence is installed:

example.com/example-one

example.org/example-one

We only recommend using this feature if you are trying to catch a specific hacker to block them, or if you are trying to catch hackers that are trying to exploit a known vulnerability or page on your site. Be careful not to visit the banned URL yourself by accident, as you will be blocked instantly.

When blocked via this option, an IP address will be blocked for the duration you have specified with the option “How long is an IP address blocked when it breaks a rule” found under the “Rate Limiting” rules.

Ignored IP addresses for Wordfence Web Application Firewall alerting

If you are regularly running a scanning, uptime, or other bot-like services against your site and you do not want to be alerted about an increased attack rate, you can enter the IP address of that service here. Make sure that you trust the service since you will not receive any alerts if the IP address attacks your site.

Rules

The Wordfence firewall has a number of rules that match known attacks commonly seen and exploited in the wild. The patterns for these attacks are specific and require minimal processing in determining if the request matches. The firewall also uses a number of generic rules that use pattern matching to determine if the request looks malicious. These are designed to prevent “0-days” for known types of attacks from being exploited.

If you are having problems with false positive blocks where legitimate visitors are blocked from performing a specific action, then individual firewall rules can be disabled for testing purposes. You can use the Wordfence Live Traffic page feed to discover which firewall rule caused a specific block.

At the bottom of this section, there is a button that allows you to manually refresh the firewall rules. Firewall rules are automatically updated on your site but you may on occasion be prompted by Wordfence support to manually refresh them.

Brute Force Protection

Brute force protection prevents attempts to guess username and password aimed at gaining access to your WordPress administration. Wordfence provides an option to limit login attempts and several other features that secure your login page. Brute force protection is enabled by default, but you can optimize the individual options. See the full list of Brute Force Options.

Rate Limiting

Rate limiting makes it more difficult for attackers to perform unauthorized scanning and scraping of your site. Rate Limiting options come with a default set of values that you can customize. See the full list of Rate Limiting Options.

Allowlisted URLs

The firewall allowlist is part of the “Learning Mode” feature of Wordfence, which lets the firewall learn to not block safe requests even if the firewall considers them to appear suspicious. You can read more about the allowlist and Learning Mode here.

Monitor Background Requests for False Positives

Within the WordPress environment, some requests are made via AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Such requests do not involve loading a new page, but instead, perform various tasks in the background. The Wordfence firewall can block background requests that use AJAX, showing a message that says “Background Request Blocked”.

This can prevent certain types of attacks, but some plugins and themes may trigger this message as well, even if their requests are safe. It is most likely to occur when adding custom HTML or JavaScript code in fields that are separate from the WordPress core. As the administrator of the site, you can choose to allow these blocked requests by clicking the Allowlist button, if you were simply working on the site when they occur. This message is only shown for logged-in administrators of the site, so regular visitors, subscribers, authors, editors, or other types of users on your site will not see them.

If you see this message when clicking a link that was sent to you by another person, or a link from another site that leads to your site, it may not be safe to add it to the allowlist. You can contact us about blocked requests if you are not sure whether they are dangerous. Be sure to include a description of what you were working on at the time.

Wordfence loads a script for logged-in admins that monitors background requests that get blocked by the firewall, to alert you if something was blocked that might not need to be blocked. The option “Monitor Background Requests for False Positives” allows you to disable this script if you like, by unchecking either or both checkboxes. One is for the front-end of your site and the other for the administration section of your site. Disabling the monitoring script does not affect the firewall’s protection, but may make it harder to notice false positives (blocking actions that are not actually malicious).