Review — updated periodically

Updated August 2018: I’m leaving my review at one star due to Wordfence being tone deaf and adding the ability to add a slug of text to the blocking notification page (what users see when they are blocked), when what we need and keep asking for is the ability to swap the _entire_ blocking page for a custom file/page of our own creation.

<Updated February 16 2018> One can barely keep up with all the updates and versions Wordfence does. In any case, a recent upgrade gave us back the functionality of having a one-sheet page of settings, all good. But the latest version 7 remains crippled in terms of providing information about blocked URLs based on the “Immediately Block URLs” user created list. Version 6 did this well. Thus, I’m leaving my review at one star and beginning process of downgrading to free version and perhaps finding another security plugin. I would suggest being very careful with Wordfence. If you’re a power user and go through the process of memorizing a UI and depending on functionality, the Wordfence development culture may be very frustrating for you, as they don’t seem to care about advanced users, but instead seem to be more concerned about prettying up their user interface with a bunch of useless garbage icons and such.

Updated February 2018.
I’m dropping my review to one star. I’m a paid user, and with more time to evaluate find the new admin interface (ver 7.2) literally nauseates me, no kidding. Too many tabs, detective work required to find settings (one example out of hundreds, click “Scan” on main menu, and you get a screen with no scan settings, instead with most of the screen taken by bloated icons in excessive white space and yes, a link to settings that could instead be right there instead of requiring mouse click and page load!) I also use country blocking extensively, and during my test upgrade all my country block settings disappeared and had to be manually recreated. One of our jokes here in our shop is the more we pay for software, generally the worse it is. I hope Wordfence isn’t beginning to conform to that…

Updated January 2018.
New UI with ver 7.1 is silly, but the plugin pretty much works the same. I’ll leave my 3 star rating, due to dislike of UI. A plugin with this many users and so many options might consider providing an alternative “power user” UI that deletes all the bloat, whitespace, graphics and other junk, designed for efficiency, minimized scrolling, etc. But I’m not holding my breath. Wordfence corporate culture seems to have a tendency to re-work user interfaces apparently just because it’s there and available for implementing solutions without problems. Perhaps for staff job security?

I’d go to 5 stars if the UI was decent.

Updated 2016. I’ve spent hours trying to get the new version’s firewall to work, with no success. A partially working plugin might be ok when it’s just some minor plugin, but some of us are building our whole website security strategy around Wordfence, then they have us “upgrade” to a version that only partially works. On top of that, I’m told I’m still protected, even though the firewall isn’t 100%. Well, if I’m protected without the firewall, why is the new firewall in there anyway? None of it makes any sense. I paid for premium version and as of this time I’d have to spend hours if not days creating an entirely different security environment if I cancel Wordfence, so I’m leaving it installed for now. But I’m dropping my rating to one star and trying hard to figure out another security strategy that eliminates Wordfence and uses a plugin selection that’s more reliable.

Note, caching didn’t work for me in previous version. I was just getting around to being bold enough to try it again. Never got to it, and I don’t think I want to go there, judging from the fact that Wordfence is not entirely working even without reaching my trembling mouse hand over to the caching enable checkboxes…

Updated 2016. As I liked the Wordfence concept, I revisited the forum and noticed support seems to be better and features have been added. So I bought premium version and am giving it another go. This time I tried the caching options again and they are OK but not great, nothing in there that’s very robust. So I don’t use the caching. Otherwise I’m using all other WF features to the max. I’m realizing that some of the features are still quite primitive, yet still useful.

Another thing: I want to depend on Wordfence to block a lot of bad IP numbers using their “network.” Reality is I still get hit by quite a few bad IPs that I can easily verify as being bad by researching various public black lists. It’s surprising that Wordfence doesn’t incorporate more of these available blacklists on the backend, included in their “network”. Yes, some blacklists cost money, but how about including this feature in the premium version? Instead, I’m still stuck with manually blocking bad IP numbers that are already on block lists but slip past the Wordfence system.

Another thing, the premium version country blocking is an important feature, but needs a split between admin side and public side. For example, for super effective country blocking it’s nice to block the whole world other than your home country from WordPress admin and breath a big sigh of relief as you block literally millions of bad actors and force them to use VPNs and such, which they generally do not use as as there is so much low hanging fruit for them to go after. With a split option for country blocking, you could then fine tune your public side, or not do any public side country blocking at all if you’re concerned about being sure folks in Somalia or Antarctica can access your website.

I could go on. In any case, I’m bumping up to three stars. Perhaps the next version will go to four, or five?

Thanks, MTN

• This topic was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by mountainguy2.
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• This topic was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by mountainguy2.
• This topic was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by mountainguy2.
• This topic was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by mountainguy2.