Wordfence on Staging site

  • Resolved Jim Sharp

    (@scootertrash)


    7 months, 3 weeks ago

    Hello,

    Let me begin by stating that I operate my website as a hobbyist and I’m learning as I go.

    That being said, I use the free version of Wordfence and free version of WP Staging to create my “staging” site which get’s created as part of my existing page (example: https://mydomain.com/staging).

    When I visit the staging site at the URL and log into the WP console, this is the first thing I see.

    “To make your site as secure as possible, take a moment to optimize the Wordfence Web Application Firewall: ?Click here to configure“

    I’m wondering what I should do with this, and if it’s even necessary? Since it’s created as part of my existing site vs a sub domain, do I even need to run the second instance of Wordfence? I usually just dismiss the message and reset the permalinks on the new staging site, but I always have that question in the back of my head.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @scootertrash, thanks for reaching out!

    As your staging site lives in a subfolder of the main site, the ideal order is to optimize subdirectory installations first, but it’s fine to do it the other way around. When you try optimizing the staging site, it will show an “existing auto prepend rule” and you’ll want to choose the “OVERRIDE” option on that.

    If you experience any issues with scans on your main site including the staging directory and using up more resources than you’d like, you can put staging/* in Wordfence > All Options > Advanced Scan Options > Exclude files from scan that match these wildcard patterns.

    Thanks,
    Peter.

    Thread Starter Jim Sharp

    (@scootertrash)

    Hello Peter, and thank you for your reply.

    I have only a short question of clarification, and I only ask because I am not experienced in html/css, etc. In other places I’ve seen similar syntax for inclusions and exclusions, but they were normally prepended with a “/” so that it might read “/staging/*” vs. “staging/*”. Does that matter in this instance?

    Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @scootertrash,

    The filepaths in Exclude files from scan that match these wildcard patterns and List of directories to exclude from recently modified file list have no preceding slash in their examples because the path is obtained with ABSPATH. Adding a slash might therefore cause a double-slash in the path that can cause issues.

    Immediately block IPs that access these URLs and Allowlisted 404 URLs require a preceding slash because the paths are obtained differently. These differences do appear in our documentation example inputs, but I appreciate it may not be clear why. I’ve noted this for our QA team to look at.

    Thanks again,
    Peter.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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