5 Best Firewall Plugins for WordPress

Ninetheme

What Is Firewall Plugin?

Security in WordPress is a very important issue for website owners. An important way to keep your website secure is to use a firewall because the firewall protects your website against cyber attacks, brute force attacks and denial of service (DDoS) attacks. So,  w’re going to make a list of the best WordPress firewall plugins for you in this article.

What is a WordPress Firewall Plugin?

The firewall plugin, which is also known as Web application firewall or WAF, acts as a shield between your website and incoming traffic to your site. The firewall plugins analyze the traffic to your site and eliminates security threats by performing many sorting operations. In addition, WordPress firewall plugins not only provide your security, but also speed up your site and improve its performance.

There are two common types of WordPress firewall plugins. Those are;

DNS Level Website Firewall: The function of this firewall is that it only redirects traffic to your site through cloud proxy servers. In addition, it allows only real traffic to come to your server.

Application Level Firewall: These plugins, on the other hand, analyze your traffic before installing most wordpress scripts when they reach your server. Of course, it worths to note that this method is not as efficient as a DNS-level firewall in reducing your server load.

As a Ninetheme team, we recommend using a DNS-level firewall, as they are very good at detecting real website traffic and bad requests.

Let’s briefly talk about how they do this process. It analyses thousands of websites, searches for bad IP’s which are known as botnets in order to block your users ‘ traffic to pages they never want to go to.

We can now list the five best firewall plugins in WordPress.

We can say that it is the most known website security plugin for WordPress. Sucuri is a firewall plugin that at the DNS level.  In addition, it protects your site against cyber attacks and brute force attacks. All your website traffic go through cloud proxy servers. It allows real traffic to pass by blocking malicious requests.

It also performs cache optimization and speed up your website. With the help of Anycast CDN, it improves your website’s performance by reducing your server load. Apart from these, it protects your website against some attacks such as SQL injections, XSS, RCE, RFU.

Setting up WAF is very simple. All you have to do is add a DNSA record to your domain and redirect them to Sucuri’s cloud proxy instead of your website.

Finally, you should know that you need to pay for this plugin and it starts at $ 199.99 annually.

MaksCDN, which is a part of the StackPath family, is one of the sector’s leading CDN security and firewall providers. One of the important features is that robust platforms Add Layer 3 and 4 DDoS protection to all plans by default.

It also adds layer 7 DDoS protection to protected areas. Just like sucuri, it not only speeds up your site, but also provides you with DNS-level security against malicious attacks.

StackPath does not offer an application-level firewall because there is no WordPress plugin. That’s why it ranks second on our list.

As for the price, they offer a 1-month free trial, as well as starting at$20 per month. It is an adequate application for small business websites.

Cloudflare, which includes basic DDoS Protection, also includes free CDN service. Hovewer, their free service do not include the firewall unfortunately. Enabling firewall service comes at a price and for WAF, you need to use the pro version.

This application is additionally a DNS-level firewall. In this way, it improves the performance of your websiteeven when there is a lot of traffic on your site.

You should know that the Pro version only provides DDoS protection against layer 3 attacks. The application also has a CDN, caching and a wider network of servers.

As for the disadvantages of Cloudflare, we can list that it does not offer application-level security scans, malware protection, security notifications and alerts

The pro version is $ 20 per month and for businesses it is $200 per month.

Wordfence which is a popular WordPress plugin, has a built-in website firewall. it analyses your file changes, SQL injections and more in order to protect your WordPress website from malware. In addition to those, it protects your website from brute force and  DDoS attacks.

Wordfence blocks malicious traffic to your website. Incoming traffic to your website will encounters a firewall and malicious entries will be blocked. it is an application at the application level Wordfence also offers security scanning and even offers a scheduled scanning if demanded. It also allows you to manually control traffic and block any unwanted IP directly from your WordPress admin panel. You should know that you need a Premium version to get an advanced firewall features.

This plugin is free but you should know that the premium version starts at $99 per year for a single website license.

Jatpack is a WordPress plugin,which has important features such as WordPress security and backups. You should be aware that there is an application-level firewall, which means that bad traffic is blocked after reaching to your to website. It also protects your website against brute force attacks. You need to upgrade to at least the Personal plan to unlock daily automated backups and automated spam filtering.

The plugin is free. However, the Personal version is set at $39/year and the Professional is set at $299/year.