IP blocking

Try one of these plugins: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/tags/ip-blocker/

Thanks for the reply.
I’ve seen them before, but wanted to avoid using a plugin if possible.

This could certainly be developed as a custom code snippet. The hook https://developer.www.ads-software.com/reference/hooks/init/ would be suitable I think. There you would have to read the calling IP via $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’] and compare it with the list you created. If it is included, you just do a wp_die().

That’s right.
I have this:

<?php $deny = array("111.111.111", "222.222.222", "333.333.333");
if (in_array ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], $deny)) {
   header("location: https://site.com/");
   exit();
} ?>

And with this https://www.countryipblocks.net/acl.php to get the addresses.

The only problem is that I still can’t replace ip examples with a list of ip ranges.

But I was curious if the default solution from WordPress is better in terms of efficiency/resources/request.

There is a “default solution” for this from WordPress. My description above requires custom programming.

So far you have only talked about IP list, not IP ranges. This is more a question of how to solve this in PHP. Here someone wrote an answer to this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11121817/how-to-check-an-ip-address-is-within-a-range-of-two-ips-in-php

If you do it via the init hook, it should be efficient enough. However, it would be even better if you put the blocking in your server environment. Talk to your hosting support about it.

To my knowledge, ip blocker from cpanel also writes in .htaccess.
Anyway, I will also ask the hosting.
I will also study this post from stackowerflow in more detail.
Thanks for the answers and involvement.