You want to secure your website against cyber threats but don’t know which firewall plugin you should install on your WordPress website. Then, here’s an article explaining to you the best WordPress firewall plugins that you should use to safeguard your website against brute force, DDoS attacks, traffic spam, and a plethora of other web threats.
Moving forward, let’s understand the importance of the WordPress firewall plugin.
What is a WordPress Firewall Plugin?
WordPress firewall plugins are one security plugin that acts as a shield securing your websites against numerous cyber attacks. Firewall plugins monitor your website traffic in real-time, and if it finds any spammy or suspicious traffic, it blocks the traffic from moving forward.
These WordPress firewall plugins also improve the website’s performance by mitigating DDoS attacks and reducing the server load.
You can find two types of WordPress firewall plugins:
DNS Level Website Firewall: In this DNS level website firewall, cloud proxy servers are used to route your website traffic. This, in turn, allows filtering of genuine and bad requests. The bad request will be discarded, while the genuine traffic will be forwarded to your website.
Application Level Firewall: An application-level firewall plugin examines the data in the network traffic even before WordPress scripts are loaded. However, one major drawback is that this type of firewall isn’t efficient in minimizing the server load.
Of the two WordPress firewall plugin types, DNS level website firewall is more efficient in filtering out bad requests.
Now, without any further delay, let’s glance at some of the best WordPress firewall plugins to filter out spammy website traffic.
Best WordPress Firewall Plugin
Below we have offered you the list of best WordPress firewall plugins to use on your website:
Cloudflare
If you have a website, you may have heard the name of Cloudflare, a globally recognized CDN provider that has helped several websites boost their performance. In addition to the Content Delivery Network, Cloudflare offers several security features that help secure your site.
One such security feature is a DNS level firewall.
Cloudflare’s firewall plugin is first on our list of best WordPress firewall plugins because it can minimize bandwidth usage by up to 60% and is efficient in tackling traffic surges.
Cloudflare plugin packs numerous features like:
- DDoS Attack Mitigation
- Prevents Bot Abuse
- Offers SSL/TLS security standards
- Cloudflare WAF
Cloudflare is available in both free and premium plans. However, the free plan is enough for bloggers.
Note: Cloudflare works on the network level. So, it doesn’t have application-level scans.
BBQ Firewall
BBQ Firewall, with more than 100K installations, is one of the simplest and most lightweight firewall plugins. Due to its lightweight nature, it also is one of the fastest WAFs for WordPress.
In spite of being small in size, the plugin is highly powerful in blocking spammy website traffic and bots.
BBQ firewall works on the network level; it filters all the requests and blocks the bad requests like the base 64 and long request strings.
BBQ Firewall offers security against:
- SQL injection attacks
- Executable file uploads
- Directory traversal attacks
- Insecure character requests
- Extremely long requests
- PHP remote/file execution
- XSS, XXE, and related attacks
- Offers security against bad bots
- Safeguards against threat/bad actors
BBQ Firewall comes in both free and pro versions.
Sucuri
The last plugin in our list of the best WordPress firewall plugins is Sucuri. The plugin offers several features like brute force attack prevention, DNS level firewall, removal of malware, etc. However, WAF is not offered for free, and you need to buy a premium plan.
Basically, Sucurri redirects the website traffic to its proxy servers, where each and every request is scanned closely. Sucuri forwards genuine traffic to the website while discards bad requests.
Sucuri minimizes the server load by blocking botnet attacks and enhances the performance of a website with caching optimizations, website acceleration, and CDN.
Additionally, the Sucuri firewall safeguards your website against SQL Injections, XSS, RCE, RFU, and other known attacks.
Features of Sucuri include:
- Security activity auditing
- File integrity monitoring
- Remote malware scanning
- Blocklist monitoring
- Effective security hardening
- Post-hack security actions
- Security notifications
- Website firewall
Best WordPress Firewall Plugin: Conclusion
Cloudflare is best for bloggers looking for a free firewall plugin or WordPress beginners who are new to the industry.
If you are a blogger or a novice in the WordPress field, Cloudflare is ideal for you. BBQ firewall plugin can be tested on new WordPress websites. Sucuri is ideal for websites with high traffic or website owners who want a premium security experience.
We hope this article helped you pick the best WordPress firewall plugin.
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