Are you looking for the best WordPress firewall plugin for your website?WordPress firewall plugins protect your website against hacking, brute force, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In this article, we’ll compare the simplest WordPress firewall plugins, and the way they pile up against one another.
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What is a WordPress Firewall Plugin?
A WordPress firewall plugin (also referred to as web application firewall or WAF), acts as a shield between your website and every one incoming traffic. These web application firewalls monitor your website traffic and block many common security threats before they reach your WordPress site.
Aside from significantly improving your WordPress security, often these web application firewalls also speed up your website and boost performance.
There are two common types of WordPress firewall plugins available.
DNS Level Website Firewall – These firewalls route your website traffic through their cloud proxy servers. This allows them to only send genuine traffic to your web server.
Application Level Firewall – These firewall plugins examine the traffic once it reaches your server but before loading most WordPress scripts. This method is not as efficient as a DNS level firewall in reducing the server load.
We recommend using a DNS level firewall because they are exceptionally good at identifying genuine website traffic vs bad requests.
They do that by tracking thousands of websites, comparing trends, trying to seek out botnets, known bad IPs, and blocking traffic to pages that your users would normally never request.
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Not to mention, DNS-level website firewalls significantly reduce the load on your WordPress hosting server, ensuring that your website does not go down.
Having said that, let’s take a look at the only WordPress firewall plugins that you simply simply can use to protect your website.
best WordPress firewall plugin?
1. Sucuri
Sucuri is that the leading website security company for WordPress. They offer DNS-level firewall, intrusion, and brute force prevention, also as malware and blacklist removal services.
All your website traffic goes through their cloud proxy servers where each request is scanned. Legitimate traffic is allowed to undergo, and every one malicious requests are blocked.
Sucuri also improves your website’s performance by reducing server load through caching optimization, website acceleration, and Anycast CDN (all included). It protects your website against SQL Injections, XSS, RCE, RFU, and each known attack.
Setting up their WAF is quite easy. You will get to add a DNS A record to your domain and point them to Sucuri’s cloud proxy rather than your website.
Pricing: Starting from $199.99/year billed annually.
Grade: A+
2. MaxCDN (StackPath)
MaxCDN (now a neighborhood of StackPath family) is one of the leading CDN security and web application firewall providers within the industry. Their robust platform by default adds Layer 3 and 4 DDoS protection on all plans.
The StackPath WAF adds Layer 7 DDoS protection to the domains under its protection. Similar to Sucuri, this is often often a DNS level firewall that not only helps you speed up your website but also protects you from malicious attacks.
StackPath doesn’t offer an application-level firewall because they are doing not have a WordPress plugin which is why they’re #2 in our list after Sucuri. However, their plans are cheaper and featured-packed for little businesses compared to Cloudflare (our #3 ranked provider).
Pricing: They offer a 1 month free trial and after that pricing starts at $20 per month which is sufficient for most small business WordPress websites.
Grade: A
3. Cloudflare
Cloudflare is best known for its free CDN service which incorporates basic DDoS protection also. However, their free plan doesn’t include an internet site application firewall. For WAF you’ll got to signup for his or her Pro plan.
Cloudflare is additionally a DNS level firewall that suggests your traffic goes through their network. This improves the performance of your website and reduces downtime just in case of unusually high traffic.
The Pro plan only includes DDoS protection against layer 3 attacks. For protection against advanced DDoS layer 5 and seven attacks, you’ll need a minimum of their business plan.
Cloudflare has its pros, which include CDN, caching, and a bigger network of servers. The downside is that they are doing not offer application-level security scans, malware protection, blacklist removal, security notifications, and alerts. They also don’t monitor your WordPress site for file changes and other common WordPress security threats.
For more details see our comparison of Sucuri vs Cloudflare.
Pricing: Starting from $20/month for Pro plan and $200/month for Business.
Grade: A-
4. Wordfence Security
Wordfence could also be a well-liked WordPress security plugin with a built-in website application firewall. It monitors your WordPress site for malware, file changes, SQL injections, and more. It also protects your website against DDoS and brute force attacks.
Wordfence is an application-level firewall that suggests that firewall is triggered on your server and bad traffic is blocked after it reaches your server but before loading your website.
This is not the foremost efficient thanks to blocking attacks. A large number of bad requests will still increase the load on your server. Because it’s an application-level firewall, WordPress doesn’t accompany a content delivery network (CDN).
Wordfence comes with on-demand security scans also as scheduled scans. It also allows you to manually monitor traffic and block suspicious-looking IPs directly from your WordPress admin area.
To learn more about Wordfence, see our guide on how to install and setup Wordfence security in WordPress.
To get their sophisticated application level firewall, you really need the Premium version.
Pricing Basic plugin is Free. Premium version pricing starts from $99/year for a single site license.
Grade: B+
5. Jetpack
Jetpack may be a popular WordPress plugin that comes with a set of features including WordPress security and backups. Similar to WordFence, Jetpack is an application-level firewall that suggests that bad traffic is blocked after it reaches your WordPress hosting server.
Their free plan offers very basic brute force protection and downtime monitoring. You will need to upgrade to a minimum of the private decide to unlock daily automated backups and automatic spam filtering.
However to really unlock the automated malware scanning and security fixes which is what providers like Sucuri offer, you’ll need to get on Jetpack professional plan.
Since Jetpack offers an outsized suite of features, the worth tag makes it a really affordable option. However, for a real security firewall, you’re happier going with Sucuri or MaxCDN.
Pricing: Basic plugin is free. Personal plan costs $39 / yr and Professional plan costs $299 / yr.
Grade: B
6. BulletProof Security
BulletProof Security is another popular WordPress security plugin. It comes with a built-in application-level firewall, login security, database backup, maintenance mode, and variety of other security tweaks to protect your website.
BulletProof security doesn’t offer a very good user experience and much of beginners may have difficulty understanding what to undertake to to . It does accompany a setup wizard that automatically updates your WordPress .htaccess files and enables firewall protection.
It doesn’t have a file scanner to see malicious code on your website. The paid version of the plugin offers extra features to watch for intrusion and malicious files in your WordPress uploads folder.
Pricing: Free basic plugin. Pro version costs $59.95 for unlimited sites and lifetime support.
Grade: C
Conclusion
After careful comparison of these popular WordPress firewall plugins, we believe that Sucuri is undoubtedly the simplest firewall protection you’ll get for your WordPress site.
It is the simplest DNS level firewall with the foremost comprehensive security measures to offer you complete peace of mind. On top of that, the performance boost that you simply get from their CDN is extremely impressive.
MaxCDN (StackPath) would be an in-depth second on our list for the worth and value it offers.
We hope this text helped you discover the simplest WordPress firewall plugin for your website. You may also want to see our ultimate step-by-step WordPress security guide for beginners.
