Wordfence provides a free community edition which includes our full featured firewall and malware scanner, along with many other protections, like two factor authentication. Wordfence Free does an excellent job of protecting your site. However, the threat intelligence that it receives is delayed by 30 days and is missing our IP blocklist.
What this means is that, when we release a new firewall rule to protect against an emerging threat, the free version of Wordfence only receives that rule 30 days after our paid customers receive it. The same applies to malware signatures, which allow Wordfence to detect new malware variants. Our paid customers receive these new signatures instantly, and our free customers receive the rule 30 days later.
The free version of Wordfence is also missing our IP blocklist, which is a list of IPs that are currently attacking WordPress. The list ranges in size from 10,000 IP addresses to over 100,000, depending on the frequency, severity and diversity of attacks on any given day. Wordfence immediately blocks any kind of access from these active attackers. Our paid customers have access to this real-time IP list, and our free customers do not.
Wordfence free has about 90 percent of the functionality that our paid product has and it is a great way to try out Wordfence and get set up. Upgrading to paid does not require a reinstall. You simply enter your API key and viola! You’re upgraded with real-time threat intelligence, our IP bocklist, our country blocking feature and more.
Simply sign into your WordPress website as administrator. Go to your Dashboard > Plugins > Add New.
Then do a search for ‘Wordfence’ and click "Install Now" and complete the installation. Wordfence will guide you through the setup process. Once you’re done, you will be running the free version of Wordfence with our fully functional Firewall and Malware scan active.
Upgrading from Wordfence Free to paid is incredibly easy. Once you install Wordfence Free, be sure to set it up in Wordfence Central, which gives you a way to manage all your sites in one place and to manage your license keys.
Once you have your site set up in Central, if you choose to upgrade, simply hit the ‘Upgrade’ link next to your site in Wordfence Central and you’ll be guided through the process to upgrade to Wordfence Premium, Wordfence Care or Wordfence Response.
The Wordfence team are active in the WordPress.org support forums where we provide support for users of Wordfence Free. If you upgrade to any paid version of Wordfence, you’ll receive priority support via our Premium support ticketing system. Wordfence Care and Wordfence Response customers are serviced first in our priority queue.
Our team prioritizes our paid customers over free, so if you post in the WordPress.org forums, it may take a couple of days to receive a response, but we do try to get back to everyone.
