Daily Scan Only?

Hi @consultant1027,

On the free version of Wordfence, scans can only be automatically scheduled.

So what you can do is enable Schedule Wordfence Scans (within Wordfence -> Scan).
And then disable everything else with Wordfence -> All Options, such as:

– All rules (such as whitrelist, lfi, sqli, xss, etc) within Wordfence -> Unchecked
– Brute Force Protection -> Disabled
– Rate Limiting -> Disabled
– Live Traffic mode -> Security Only

Note that this will only result in a marginal speed increase (if you’re doing this for speed reasons).

Dave

What does “automatically scheduled” mean? Does that mean I have no control over the schedule and if so, how does Wordfence decide when to schedule a scan?

Note that this will only result in a marginal speed increase (if you’re doing this for speed reasons).

If this results in only a marginal speed increase either this is inferring (a) Wordfence has a negligible decrease in speed with all the options turned on, or, (b) Wordfence is still doing decreasing the speed (as opposed to no Wordfence installed) despite turning off the options? If the answer is (b), what is it doing to decrease the speed?

Hi again,

Wordfence automatic scans run every 72 hours. ( https://www.wordfence.com/help/scan/scheduling/ )
There’s no control to set the frequency of scans in the free version.

As for disabling settings within Wordfence, there’s no noticeable changes in speed.

To get a bit more detailed:

Rules in the firewall are only checked if it makes sense to do so. For example, the SQL Injection rule will only scan the request if there are SQL related symbols in the request. So not all the rules (even when they are enabled) will be tested against a request, which speeds up the firewall significantly.

The only thing that may have an impact on performance is Live Traffic. When it is set to All Traffic, a small JavaScript file is loaded on the front-end.

If you could explain why you want to disable all the features except for the automatic scan, this might help me understand a bit better.

Dave