Hey, are you looking for the “WordPress Firewall Plugins”
WordPress firewall plugins protect your website against hacking, SQL Injection, cross-site scripting route, brute force, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
If you search across the web so you will get many firewall plugins, but the problem is that how to choose the best firewall plugin.
Don’t worry we are here.
In our Blogging journey, we test and analyzed many WordPress Firewall Plugins after that, we select the best 5 WordPress Firewall Plugins.
What Is a WordPress Firewall Plugin?
A WordPress firewall plugin is a guard between your website and all incoming traffic. A Firewall also is known as WAF (Web Application Firewall).
The Firewalls monitor your website traffic and block many popular security threats before they reach your WordPress site.
These web application firewalls also speed up your website and boost performance.
- How To Speed Up WordPress Website
There are two general types of WordPress firewall plugins available.
- DNS Level Website Firewall – These firewall 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 the 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.
1. Sucuri
Sucuri is the leading website security company for WordPress. They offer a DNS level firewall, intrusion, and brute force prevention, as well as malware and blacklist removal services.
- All your website traffic goes through their cloudproxy servers where each request is scanned. Legitimate traffic is allowed to pass through, and all 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 injection, XSS, RCE, RFU, and all known-attacks.
- Setting up their WAF is quite easy. You will need to add a DNS A record to your domain and point them to Sucuri’s cloudproxy instead of your website.
- At WPBeginner, we use Sucuri to improve our WordPress security. See how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3months.
- Pricing: Starting from $199.99/year billed annually.
- FREE WordPress Plugin: Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Security Hardening
- Paid Version: Securi Security
- Grade: 10/10
2. Cloudflare
Cloudflare is best known for its free CDN service which includes basic DDoS protection as well. However, their free plan doesn’t include a website application firewall. For WAF you will need to signup for their Pro plan.
- Cloudflare is also a DNS level firewall which means your traffic goes through their network. This improves the performance of your website and reduces downtime 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 7 attacks, you will need at least their business plan.
- Cloudflare has its pros, which include CDN, caching, and a larger network of servers. The downside is that they do not offer application-level security scans, malware protection, blacklist removal, security notifications, and alerts. They also do not 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.
- Free WordPress Plugin: Cloudflare
- Enable via cPanel – You can also enable Cloudflare via your cPanel on any HostUtopia Web Hosting Package.
- Paid Version: CloudFlare Firewall
- Grade: 9/10
3. Wordfence Security
Wordfence Security is one of the most popular WordPress security plugins, and for good reason. This gem pairs simplicity with powerful protection tools, such as the robust login security features and the security incident recovery tools. One of the main advantages of Wordfence is the fact that you can gain insight into overall traffic trends and hack attempts.
Features That Make WordFence Security a Great Choice:
- The free version is powerful enough for smaller websites.
- Developers can save tons of money when they signup for multiple site keys.
- It has a full firewall suite with tools for country blocking, manual blocking, brute force protection, real-time threat defense, and a web application firewall.
- The scan portion of the plugin fights off malware, real-time threats, and spam. It scans all your files for malware, not just WordPress files.
- The plugin monitors live traffic by viewing things like Google crawl activity, logins and logouts, human visitors, and bots.
- You gain access to some unique tools like the option to sign in with your cell phone and password auditing.
- The comment spam filter removes the need to install a separate plugin for this.
- It monitors your plugins and lets you know if they have been removed from the WordPress plugin repository (usually due to being unsafe or being hacked) are no longer being updated and have been abandoned.
4. SiteLock
SiteLock is another well-known website security company offering website application firewall, DDoS protection, malware scan, and removal services.
- SiteLock’s WAF is a DNS level firewall with a CDN service included in all plans to improve the performance of your website. They offer daily malware scans, file change monitoring, security alerts, and malware removal.
- All plans include basic DDoS protection while advanced DDoS protection is available as an add-on. They also allow customers to display the SiteLock trust seal on their websites.
- Pricing: Accelerate Plan costs $299 / year and the Prevent plan costs $499 / year.
- Paid Version: SiteLock
- Grade: 8/10
5. Jetpack
Jetpack is a popular WordPress plugin that comes with a suite of features including WordPress security and backups. Similar to WordFence, Jetpack is an application-level firewall which means 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 have to upgrade to at least the Personal plan to unlock daily automated backups and automated spam filtering.
However to truly unlock the automated malware scanning and security fixes which is what providers like Sucuri offer, you will have to be on Jetpack’s professional plan.
Since Jetpack offers a large suite of features, the price tag makes it a very affordable option. However, for a true security firewall, you’re better off going with Sucuri or MaxCDN.
Pricing: The basic plugin is free. Personal plan costs $39 / yr and the Professional plan costs $299 / yr.
Conclusion
After careful comparison of all these popular WordPress firewall plugins, we believe that Securi Security is clearly the best firewall protection you can get for your WordPress site.
It is the best DNS level firewall with the most comprehensive security features to give you complete peace of mind. On top of that, the performance boost that you get from their CDN is very impressive.
Based on Price/Performance we also recommend the WordFence Plugin, this gives you a ton of features at no cost.