Announcing Wordfence 6.3.0 – Exciting Improvements
This morning I’m very excited to announce the release of Wordfence 6.3.0. This is one of our bigger releases and it includes a few exciting changes to the user interface and the way Wordfence helps you secure your site.
Since 2012, Wordfence has been securing WordPress. We started with a handful of important security features. As Wordfence became successful, as the team grew and as we improved the product, the list of menus in Wordfence kept increasing.
Another side-effect of improvements in Wordfence is that the number of things you need to pay attention to also increased.
In user interface design, as with just about everything else, attention is in short supply. We are all busy with plenty of other important things to do in our day to day lives. Securing our WordPress websites is just one of our many priorities.
With the release of Wordfence 6.3.0, the team started by thinking carefully about what is most important when it comes to security. We also looked at the range of functions that Wordfence provides and how they are related to each other.
Finally, the team considered how best to communicate with our users when they have a security problem or something else important they need to know about.
Introducing the Wordfence Dashboard
The first change we’ve introduced is the new Wordfence Dashboard.
The Wordfence Dashboard appears at the top of the new menu structure on the left in your WordPress admin console. The Dashboard is a way for you to view your security posture at a glance. Some of the data the new Dashboard includes is:
- When your last scan completed.
- If any security problems were detected.
- Important security notifications.
- What security features are enabled and disabled.
- The number of Threat Defense Feed rules you have enabled and protecting your site. These are malware signatures and firewall rules.
- Attacks that have been blocked by Wordfence during the past day, week and month.
- The top IP addresses we have blocked in the past day, week and month.
- Attacks blocked over time (a chart) across the Wordfence network of sites we protect.
- The top countries that attacks on your website are originating from.
- Successful and failed login attempts on your WordPress site.
The Dashboard is completely new, available at the top of your WordPress menu and gives you an instant view of your WordPress site security status.
Menu Redesign
The next thing you will notice in the newest version of Wordfence is the redesign of the menu on the left side of your site.
As you can see the Dashboard is at the top of the new menu and is your “jump off” point because it provides an overview of your website security.
Scan Page Improvements
The next item is the “Scan” menu which combines Scan and Scheduling. We have also introduced a new scan “options” tab which gives you instant access to all the Wordfence options that affect your scan. You no longer need to go to the separate “options” menu to change your scan settings – it’s right where scan is.
Meet Your New Firewall Page
The new ‘Firewall’ option on the menu is one of the most exciting changes in Wordfence 6.3.0 because it consolidates all firewall related security options onto a single page which looks like this:
As you can see above, the new tabs on this page give you tabbed access to:
- Your Web Application Firewall configuration or WAF. This is the most important firewall option available because our WAF provides the best protection available against attacks.
- Country Blocking which allows you to selectively block countries.
- You can view and manage Blocked IPs.
- Advanced Blocking gives you the ability to build blocking patterns based on address ranges, browser, referring site and more.
- Brute Force Protection which lets you prevent login and password guessing attacks.
- Rate Limiting which gives you the ability to limit the rate at which automated crawlers access your site.
Live Traffic is Unchanged and Awesome
The Live Traffic menu option still takes you to the same live traffic page that includes advanced filtering and a real-time view of your website activity. As always, live traffic shows you attacks being blocked in real-time.
Introducing the new ‘Tools’ menu option
The Tools menu option in Wordfence is new. It combines our powerful security tools into a set of tabs that lets you easily find and access them:
As you can see we have combined the following:
- Password Audit is now the default tab visible when you hit the ‘Tools’ page.
- The Whois Lookup lets you get detailed information on an attacking IP address or hostname.
- Cellphone Sign-in gives you the ability to enable and manage two-factor authentication on a per-user basis.
- The Diagnostics page is our page for diagnosing issues with your system. It provides tools and information related to diagnostics.
The Options Page Remains Unchanged
The Wordfence ‘Options’ page at the bottom of our menu gives you the ability to manage all of your Wordfence options in one place. It is also where you install your Wordfence Premium API key if you have purchased one, in order to upgrade to Wordfence Premium.
Always Improving
Improving Wordfence is a collaborative process. I’d like to thank our user community for all the valuable feedback they’ve given us over the past months and years. Whether you have contributed in the comments on this blog, in our public forums or via a Premium support ticket, we appreciate your input.
Wordfence will continue to evolve and improve this year. We have a few exciting new features we will be announcing later this year that will help make your website even safer.
Please leave your feedback in the comments. Because this is a release announcement, I should add that we don’t recommend you post support requests in the comments below. Our support team does not check these comments. They are waiting to help you in our public support forum and in our Premium ticketing system.
Finally, a huge congratulations to all the team members involved in this release. This was a big one with many moving parts and a lot of testing. Congratulations team!
Comments
10:27 am
Your plugin just keeps getting better! Thanks!
11:00 am
Nice updates, loving the new dashboard!
11:01 am
Will make sure that my sites are updated now. Great new features! Thank you!
11:06 am
This is an outstanding plug-in, and I really love the new dashboard!!
BUT… that floating legend at the top of the Live Traffic view is really quite annoying!
I get why it was changed to be floating, but why not have simply kept it floating on the right side of the screen so that it's not in the way of the traffic list?
(But note this is merely a quibble, 'cos the true functionality of this plug-in is absolutely amazing!!)
11:09 am
Can't find the (temporary) blocked ip's
1:05 pm
Check the Firewall menu option. Then click on the Blocked IPs tab.
3:47 pm
the blocked IP file is missing as is advanced blocking. No way to remove a blocked IP. This thing sucks
9:48 am
Please see the Firewall menu option. It is now a tab when you visit that page. Screenshot above shows it.
11:13 am
AWESOME!!! Keep up the great work!! Love the changes.
11:26 am
The dashboard looks great. The options are really hard to scan through with all the labels being right-aligned. Is there some way the inputs and labels could be swapped so the labels are left-aligned? Thanks
11:31 am
Great, but what happened to the blocked IPs, advanced blocking, etc.?
12:54 pm
OK. Found it.
1:05 pm
See above. It's under the Firewall menu.
11:37 am
Thanks Mark for the update and keeping our sites secure in one way atleast!
I have wordfence installed and also got an automatic update at the moment
cheers
12:02 pm
Why has the blocking IP Addresses been removed? Where is the list of IP address offenders or Hackers? This doesn't make any sense to remove these features! If they are gone then this is a step down in an upgrade just showing fancy reporting means nothing to our IP Blocking protection!
1:07 pm
Check the Firewall menu. Then see the tabs above. I described this change in the blog post above.
12:20 pm
Great News. I do hope you come up with new features which users can optionally enable:
a) Ability to block TOR network and Anonymous Proxy Nodes.
b) Allowing entry of blocking multiple IP's manually in a single box.
c) Allowing more URL overrides options which leave Cookies enabling visitors from blocked Countries.
10:06 pm
I agree! I recently had some "undesirables" trying to get into my site with proxies. The only plugin I could find (since coding didn't work) was out-of-date and drove up my CPU. It would've been nice to temporarily use WF to block the proxies. I also had a bunch of IPs I wanted to temporarily block, but had to put them in manually.
8:35 am
Agree with the above, also how about ability to list the access history of an IP without having to find it in the list.
12:23 pm
Absolutely love your plugin. So far, it has proven to be better then a host of other security plugins put together. I've recommend your plugin to several friends with wp blogs, I hope they install Wordfence.
Thank you for a truly great plugin !
12:24 pm
Dashboard and new updates are sleek and very intuitive. Nice work and thank you!
12:41 pm
Wordfence just keeps getting better and better. Love the dashboard design, a great high level view of all that's going on, cheers.
1:06 pm
The new dashboard looks great, very useful friendly and easy to see what's going on. I also like the way the new Brute Force panels looks.
Thanks for such an amazing plugin guys!
1:07 pm
Thanks Mike!
1:16 pm
Thanks for the the new version. I would like it to be easier to monitor the effects of different settings. So please put the Blocked IPs link back to the WP dashboard menu.
9:48 am
You can find blocked IP's under the firewall menu. See the screenshot above.
4:06 pm
Thanks, but I know where it is, Too many click. That's all. Lazy :)
11:43 pm
I've shared your feedback with the team. Based on the number of people who were confused by the change of location (and thought it went missing), it's clearly a very popular page/feature. So we're going to give that some thought. Thanks all for the feedback on this.
Mark.
2:13 pm
I like most others it appears, love the new interface. As always, the functionality and protection that it provides is invaluable to my business. Keep up the great work.
6:40 pm
Love this Plugin and now you've made it even better!
9:06 pm
Great looking changes Mark. This work you do is greatly appreciated and it just gets better every update. Thanks very much to you and your entire crew.
11:14 pm
Kudos to new Dashboard.
1:03 am
Thanks, that looks great. I think there is one thing missing in the dashboard though. It doesn't show when there is still a scan in progress. In that case it shows the previous scan result, while I think it should shows something like 'Scanning'
2:12 am
Good work guys!
2:54 am
Here's my thought about Wordfence 6.3
Like: feature status, Threat Defense Feed, Firewall Summary, the table with historical Top IPs Blocked,
Dislike: Total Attacks Blocked - Wordfence Network (who cares?), having to enter the Firewall screen to access blocked IPs and Advanced Blocking. I see other people asked where they are now and I use these options almost every day, please move them back to the main menu.
Could be better: hide Premium features if not active, add a single "add IP" button in the "IPs locked out from login" panel.
Is it possibile to share on Twitter the firewall summary data? Thank you.
9:49 am
Thanks Gabriele.
3:51 am
Congratulations Mark and staff for the new version of Wordfence.
We've been users for some years now and I have to say thanks for your hard work. I have lost the count of how many times I have recommended your plugin.
I'm just waiting for the right offer to become your loyal customer! ;-)
4:22 am
Really like the new clean look, much easier to use!
Can I request that you change the wording for "Live Updates Pause", we have had several client contact us thinking that meant that the scanning is paused, resulting in them leaving the browser window open whilst it scanned to avoid the message.
It would be great if it was clearer for the non tech savvy user :-)
5:53 am
Thank you for all your work on this.
9:55 am
Well Mark you and your crew have done it again.
Everything big and bold and quick and easy to see.
You must have hired or unleashed a new design gorilla and improved their lazer focus grid...
Them Gorillas are primed and ready for battle. -Bring it on Russia cough Ukraine.
Good job.
9:15 pm
I've been using WordPress since 2006 for my personal blog. And in all that time, I've never seen a better security plugin than WordFence. I'd like to be able to express my support by buying a premium license. But that's just too expensive. Have you folks ever considered a "personal use, single-site" license? I can't tell you it'd bring in enough revenue to make you wealthy. But there are people like me who appreciate good products and want to support the developers but who aren't themselves wealthy.
Still, for as long as you have a free edition, I'm an enthusiastic user -- and I will recommend WF to my business clients.
3:54 am
Thanks Alex. At $8.25 per month our Premium license is an excellent deal and very affordable. If that's still too high, the free version of Wordfence does an excellent job of protecting your site.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Mark.
5:21 am
Hi,
Thanks for the update, but I'm not happy that you removed the Blocked IPs section. There I could make all blocked IPs permanently blocked by one click of a button. In the new interface I see no possibility to permanently block IPs. Or has this feature been moved to another place in the interface?
11:42 pm
Hi Erik. See above. It's under the Firewall menu as a tab.
10:35 am
Thanks for the the new version.
12:59 am
Great plugin,, excellent features. Keep up the good work Wordfence team. You guys are just awesome!!!
7:00 am
Keep up with the great and awesome job you guys are doing.
2:47 am
My blog is about photography, and some of the posts contain photographs that I've taken. The other day the scraper site Feedly, which is notorious for stealing content, tried to download one of the photographs separately from its post, presumably with theft in mind. The download didn't go through, though.
I know that because WordFence stopped it and kept a record. Thanks, WordFence!
12:59 am
Looking great guys! I love this new interface! Great job!
12:58 am
how i can got the icon of word-fence on my website. i want that if any visitor visit my website then he know that this website is secure
6:38 am
Thanks Muhammad. I think we had a badge program a while back but it's dormant. I'll chase it up.
Mark.
10:47 am
This plugin has been part of every site I provide and every time I help somebody with their sites I make sure they have this installed. The premium version is great too. Thank you for continuing to improve upon this!