WordPress disable XMLRPC without plugin is an easy task with this step-by-step guide. Read on to find out more. 

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our Server Management Services.

Let’s take a look at how our Support Team helped our customers disable XMLRPC without plugin.

Tutorial: WordPress disable XMLRPC without plugin

XMLRPC enables remote connections between the external applications and our site. In other words, it allows our users to interact with our WordPress website via various phone apps or blogging platforms. This came in handy during the initial Internet days when users preferred to edit content offline before connecting to the blog and publishing it later.

Unfortunately, the advantages offered by XMLRPC have drastically reduced over time. In fact, the pros outweigh the cons at this point in time. This is one of the reasons why many of our customers prefer to disable WordPress XMLRPC.

Furthermore, not disabling WordPress disable XMLRPC leads to a higher risk of DDoS attacks as well as Brute force attacks.

Before we begin, our Support Team recommends taking a few precautions as seen below:

• Take a complete backup of our WordPress site.
• Disable XMLRPC on a staging WordPress site rather than the live site initially.

After taking the above precautions, it is time to manually disable XMLRPC on our WordPress site with these steps:

1. First, log in to the WordPress hosting platform account and head to File Manager under cPanel.
2. Then, navigate to public_html folder and locate htaccess file. We can also use the search bar to find this file. In some cases, we may have to visit settings and click Show hidden files to locate htaccess file.
3. If our website does not have an htaccess file, it is time to create one via the + File option.
4. After that, open the htaccess file and add the following code to the file:

   # Block WordPress xmlrpc.php requests
   <Files xmlrpc.php>
   order deny,allow
    deny from all
    allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
   </Files>

   Remember to replace xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with an IP address that we want to offer access to xmlrpc.php. We can also remove complete access by removing that line.
5. Finally, save and exit the file.

However, if we do not have access to File Manager, we can still carry out the task of disabling XMLRPC. This can be done via an FTP client and accessing the htaccess file and adding the code seen earlier.

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Conclusion

In a nutshell, our skilled Support Engineers at Bobcares demonstrated how to disable XMLRPC without plugin. With a simple code snippet in the htaccess file we can get the job done in no time at all.