Need assistance in the Wordfence whitelist IP address option?

Wordfence is a security plugin for WordPress that help site owners to protect their sites from attacks.

However, many times it may even block legitimate users too.

At Bobcares, we often get requests from our customers to whitelist valid IP addresses as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s get into the details on how our Support Engineers help our customers with the whitelisting request.

Wordfence: A security plugin

Wordfence firewall is a PHP based, an application-level firewall that filters out malicious requests to the website.

It blocks malicious attacks and alerts the user with messages like ‘Background Request Blocked‘, ‘Wordfence has limited your access to this site‘, etc.

We can whitelist or block the IP address for securing the website.

Various reasons for Wordfence to Block

We can now go through the different cases in which Wordfence blocks the website access.

1. ‘You are temporarily locked out’: This message means that the user’s IP address has been blocked because the login attempt violated a Brute Force rule in Wordfence. Hence login with an invalid username or due to more attempts of login than allowed caused the block.

2. ‘Your access to this site has been limited‘: This means the user’s IP address has been blocked by the Wordfence Firewall by an option configured by the site owner. There will be a “Reason” describing the actual cause for the block. This may be Country Blocking or Rate Limiting etc.

3. 403 Forbidden: It means the user’s IP address is on the Wordfence IP Blacklist. This blacklist contains the top number of IP addresses that are currently engaged in attacks on WordPress websites.

However, to avoid false positives, WordPress site owners often white-list their IP addresses to avoid such blocks.

How does Wordfence whitelist IP addresses?

At Bobcares, where we have more than a decade of expertise in managing servers, we see many customers requesting to whitelist IP in Wordfence.

Now, let’s see how our Support Engineers help the customers with the request.

Most probably IP address block can be due to violating Brute Force rule in Wordfence in login attempt or any suspicious access from a particular IP address.

Frequently, many customers approach us and enquire that a particular IP address has been blocked and wants to know the exact reason.

Then, we ask for their public IP address and the logins to the dashboard of WordPress.

We also assist the customer in tracing their public IP address by simply browsing ‘IP’ in google.

After obtaining the public IP address, and logins we check for POST attempts in access logs from the corresponding IP address.

We follow the below steps to add the IP address in the Wordfence.

1. Initially, we log into the WordPress dashboard (wp-admin page).

2. After that navigate to the Wordfence option and select it.

3. Then from the drop-down select the Firewall option.

4. We then select the All Firewall Options from the screen which open.

5.  Then a new window opens which holds a box in the top which as “Whitelisted IP addresses that bypass all rules”  pop up. Here we add the user’s public IP address in the new line of the box.

Finally, Save Changes in the box at the top right side.

Here, Wordfence blindly trusts access from whitelisted IP addresses. Therefore, our Dedicated Engineers always advise customers to keep their home computer/laptop free from malware, virus, etc. Otherwise, it can create problems on the live website.

[Still having the problem with whitelisting IP address in Wordfence?- We’re available 24/7.]

Conclusion

In short, Wordfence is a security plugin that secures the website from malware attacks. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers help the customers to whitelist their IP address for not getting locked out further.