How to Block Countries from Your Website Using WordFence Premium

Categories: How To Security Spam Website Forms

By Samantha on May 10, 2022

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How to Block Countries form your website

How to protect your website from spammers

Cyber spam is annoying for website owners. No one enjoys sifting through business emails looking for clients or leads only to find spam flooding their inbox. There are a number of strategies to combat cyber spam, like setting up reCAPTCHA on forms.

ReCAPTCHA offers protection from remote digital entry by ensuring only humans can pass their cognitive tests. Unfortunately, it is not always enough to keep spam at bay. There are still human hackers that can try to infiltrate your website that can pass these tests. Luckily, many of these spammers come from specific geographical regions outside North America and can be blocked from your website using a WordPress plugin!

The Wordfence Premium has a unique country blocking tool that effectively stops malicious activity from specific geographic regions. This tool uses a commercial geolocation database to locate what country an IP address belongs to. Like most WordPress security solutions, the free version of Wordfence is available on the plugin repository. However, if you want to utilize the country blocking tool, you must upgrade to the premium version. Wordfence Premium is $99 per year for a single WordPress site. If this sounds like something you’d like to do, here is how to set up your Wordfence Premium Blocklist.

How to Block Countries Using WordFence Premium

Once you’ve upgraded, it’s time to start blocking countries using WordFence Premium. Start by heading to the toolbar on the right side of your WordPress site to click on the WordFence plugin menu.

Open the Firewall menu item >> then click the BLOCKING page tab at the top. Here you can create a blocking rule.
Click on the button next to “block type,” titled COUNTRY. Select all the countries you want to block from your site.
Select the countries you would like to block. To select a large number of countries you can click the PICK FROM LIST, it might be easier to select ALL and then unselect the countries you wish to keep unblocked. Finally, click on the BLOCK SELECTED COUNTRIES button in the lower right corner.

If you are unsure what countries you would like to block, here are the top 10 countries where cyber attacks originate! However, we suggest blocking any country you aren’t doing business with. If you are a local company, chances are you can block any country outside of North America without affecting SEO!

Once this is complete, you will have a comprehensive list of countries blocked from your site. For help with advanced blocking options, we suggest watching this video from WordFence or contacting the pros at LaLa Projects for help.

With country blocking, managing cyber spam from other countries and protecting your website, personal information, and client information is easy!