How do I delete Wordfence safely

Hi @englishtraveller1975, thanks for dropping us a message.

Generally speaking, Wordfence’s ?wordfence_lh=x&hid=xxx... query string URLs are used by Live Traffic so are normal activity, but not normal to see in Google. wordfence_lh is checking whether the visitor was detected as human. hid=... is an encrypted unique identifier so the record can be matched to another in the database.

If Google bots start listing them as “legitimate” site pages, this is usually due to a theme or plugin misconfiguration where any invalid page URLs are being redirected to the homepage. The expected behaviour when these specific URLs are visited is to return a blank page and for Google not to index them for search results. The strange thing here is that your site IS showing me this example as a blank page.

Clearing any caches such as Advanced Caching plugin and/or server-side caches you may have on your host might reduce the chance of these URLs being served by mistake in case your theme or other plugins were ever misconfigured in the past.

If you still wish to remove Wordfence fully, there are a few more steps besides deleting tables, so this might be the reason your site stops being served properly:

• Remove extended protection manually (https://www.wordfence.com/help/firewall/optimizing-the-firewall/#removing-the-optimization)
• Remove the wordfence plugin folder located in wp-content/plugins
• Remove the wflogs folder located in wp-content
• Remove wordfence-waf.php located in the root of you WordPress installation
• Remove all Wordfence related database tables from the database, using for example phpMyAdmin or Wordfence Assistant plugin.
• Check either .htaccess file or .user.ini depending on your server configuration and remove any code snippets wrapped by # Wordfence WAF and # END Wordfence WAF.

Thanks,

Peter.

Thanks Peter, appreciated.

I do apologise but I am not technical at all. So..

1. I tried using WP Fastest Cache – DELETED it – it’s gone.

2. I am now using “cache enabler” and “perfmatters”

3. I use cloudflare also.

4. I have my own VPS server

I regularly clear the cache on my site using cache enabler

Also on cloudflare by clearing the cache.

I wouldn’t know where to start to clear it on the server.

Bearing in mind my configuration, do I need to delete the cache on the server? If so are there any instructions? (it’s a self managed platform)

Are there any known conflicts or misconfigurations of the plugins or tools I have listed which would cause the problem?

There is one other thing. I added some code to my template file to redirect visits to “authour” archives to my homepage. The reason was I don’t want them to be crawled – possible duplicate content issues.

I don’t want to remove that – but could that be causing it?

If the problem stops I would want to keep WF.

Thanks again.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by Steve.

Also:

“Remove all Wordfence related database tables from the database, using for example phpMyAdmin or Wordfence Assistant plugin.”

How?

How do I do this?

Remove all Wordfence related database tables from the database, using for example phpMyAdmin or Wordfence Assistant plugin.

To repeat : I am not a technical person.

Please explain step by step.

If I might make a suggestion – perhaps you should fix the root cause of this. You should NOT have to rely on average users to poke around in wordpress tables to clear up the mess left by your plugin!

There are lots of reports online of your plugin breaking sites. It really is a very poor showing.

I have followed these instructions:

I hope this will stop Wordfence producing the garbage files.

I added the line of code to wp-config.pho and it didn’t break my site anyway.

define(‘WORDFENCE_DISABLE_LIVE_TRAFFIC’, true);

Please advise.

Hi @englishtraveller1975,

I’ve replied to your other topic: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/wordfence-keeps-breaking-my-site-enough-is-enough/#post-15574503

Wordfence’s query string links, rather than being files are simply used by Live Traffic to identify certain visitor details for blocking, visit history, etc. but don’t take up space on your server and occur on every site with Wordfence installed. The desired behavior appears to be happening in your case as I explained. I have recommended using the Wordfence Assistant plugin to ensure all references to Wordfence are removed.

Thanks,

Peter.