To upgrade to the Premium version of Wordfence, you will need to go to wordfence.com, open the “Products” > “Premium” page, and press the “Buy Now” button. When you purchase Premium you will receive a Premium license key found under the LICENSES page in your account.

Real-time protection

Wordfence Premium customers receive new firewall rules the moment our threat intelligence team releases them. When attackers invent new techniques to exploit WordPress, we deploy firewall rules to protect our Premium customers in real-time. With Wordfence Premium, you are protected from the newest exploits as we discover them.

Wordfence Premium customers also receive new malware detection capabilities in real-time. Our team writes detection signatures for new malware variants and immediately deploys those signatures to your Wordfence installation, giving you the ability to detect even the newest malware. Our malware signatures are used by your firewall to prevent hackers from uploading malware, and they are used by your Wordfence scanner to detect any malware in your filesystem.

Country blocking

Country blocking is a Premium feature that allows you to restrict access to your login page or the whole site from specific countries. You can read more about country blocking here.

Real-time IP blocklist

Users of both the free and Premium versions of Wordfence can choose to participate in the “Wordfence Security Network”. This allows us to track the malicious behavior of specific IP addresses on a large number of sites. When we detect that an IP address is behaving maliciously, it is automatically added to the Wordfence “Real-Time IP Blocklist”. The Real-Time IP Blocklist is a Premium feature of Wordfence that completely blocks access to your site from these IP addresses.

Note that users of the free version of Wordfence will only receive automatic blocking of IP addresses that have been engaged in brute force login attacks detected via the Wordfence Security Network. Premium users of the plugin will receive additional automatic blocking of IP addresses carrying out other complex attacks via the Real-Time IP Blocklist feature. You can read more about the Wordfence Security Network here.

Premium support

With Wordfence Premium you get access to our ticket-based Premium support. We aim to respond to all tickets within 24 hours during business hours. Our business hours are 9am-8pm US Eastern Time, 6am-5pm Pacific Time and 2pm-1am UTC/GMT, excluding weekends and holidays.

Our Premium support staff all have a technical background and work closely with the Wordfence quality assurance and development teams to ensure customer issues are resolved promptly and accurately.

Premium support tickets can be opened by logging in to www.wordfence.com and visiting the LICENSES page, then clicking “Get Help” next to your premium license, or by visiting https://support.wordfence.com/.

Premium license purchases

License key subscriptions are purchased in one-year increments. Prices can be discounted based on the number of active license keys in your account plus the number of license keys that you are purchasing. See further below to see how the discount is calculated. Additional one-time discounts may be available for buying multiple years upfront. The following table shows the discount levels offered for different active license key quantities:

Note that once you purchase a license key then the subscription clock starts counting down, whether you have installed the license key on a site or not.

Here are two example of how the purchase discount works.

If you are a new customer and you wanted to buy three license keys with a one year subscription then three license keys would fall under the two to four license key bracket in the table above. This means that each of the three license keys would get a 10% discount and be $107.10 USD each instead of $119 USD.

If a few months later you wanted to buy another three license keys then we add the number of active license keys in your account and the number of license keys that you want to buy together. The total license key count determines the purchase discount that you will receive for the three new license keys. As you have three active license keys in your account and you want to buy three more then that is a total of six license keys and would fall under the five to nine bracket in the table above. You would therefore get a 15% discount and pay $101.15 USD instead of $119 USD for each of the three new license keys.

Note that an active license key is one that has subscription time remaining on it. Any license keys in your account that have expired and not been renewed will not count towards any future purchase discounts.

How many license keys do I need to buy?

Each installation of the Wordfence plugin requires a unique Wordfence license key. If you have a WordPress “Multisite Network”, you only need one license key because a WordPress Multisite Network is a single installation of the WordPress file system and only has one installation of the Wordfence plugin. Wordfence must be installed as a Network activated plugin only.

You can not protect more than one WordPress installation (single or Multisite) with one premium license key unless it is a staging or development site of the accompanying production site. See the relevant section below for staging and development sites to learn more about this.

Premium license renewals

License key renewals are subject to a discount based on the number of active license keys in your account at the time of renewal. This means that your renewal price will fluctuate over the life of your license as you add or remove license keys from your account. License terms begin at purchase and renew one year from the date of purchase unless subsequent years were purchased in advance. License keys are set to automatically renew by default. The automatic renewal for any license key can be disabled on the license key management page in your wordfence.com account.

You are notified about the renewal of any of your license keys ten days before they expire. If the automatic renewal fails for any license key then a new attempt is made 5, 15, and 28 days after the license key has expired. If you are having problems with the automatic renewal of your license keys then please open a Premium support ticket.

Also, license keys can be manually renewed within one year before the expiry date. However, license keys can be manually renewed at any time after they have expired.

Please note that license keys can only be renewed for one year, even if you originally purchased a multiple year subscription.

Premium license refunds

You have 30 days after the purchase or renewal of a Premium license key to receive a full refund. After 30 days, no refunds are available. In some cases, you are able to add the remaining time to another Premium license. Please contact Customer Support for more information. Please note that Care and Response license keys have a separate refund policy.

Premium licenses purchased prior to July 24th, 2018

License keys purchased prior to July 24th, 2018 are subject to different license renewal price terms. Please contact customer service for more details.

Note that once these license keys expire you have 30 days to renew them or their prices will change based on our current pricing structure.

Installing your premium license key

When you purchase the Premium version of Wordfence, you will receive a new license key that you need to install on your site to enable the Premium features. Your Premium license keys are stored under the LICENSES page in your account on wordfence.com. You can retrieve them from your account at any time.

When you first install our plugin on your site, you have the option to install an existing Premium license.

We strongly recommend connecting your site to Wordfence Central and using it to install or upgrade your site’s license key. You can also manually install a Premium license at any time using the following steps:

• Sign in to wordfence.com with the account you created when you ordered your license key(s).
• Click the “LICENSES” menu item.
• Your license keys will be listed on the license key management page that will open.
• Copy the license key that you want to install.
• On your site, go to the Wordfence “Dashboard” > “Global Options” page.
• In the “Wordfence License” section, paste the license key that you copied from your wordfence.com account into the “License Key” field.
• Save the change and the Premium features will now be enabled.

Downgrading your license key

If you decide that you want to use your Premium license key on another site, or you want to discontinue your use of Wordfence Premium, then you can go to the “Dashboard” > “Global Options” page. In the “Wordfence License” section, click the link to reset the plugin to use a free license key. This removes your Premium license key from your site’s database and automatically installs a free license key for your site from our servers. Premium features will be disabled immediately if you choose this option. Remember to disable the automatic renewal for that license key in your wordfence.com account if it is enabled. The automatic renewal can be disabled on your license key management page.

Reset a license key so it can be used on a different site

If you have decided that you want to use your Premium license key on a different site then you will need to reset the license key in your account. In your account press the RESET button for the license key. You will see that the license key is no longer assigned to the original site and you can now install the license key on the other site. This is intended to be used infrequently and offered as a convenience to our customers.

Using a Wordfence license key on staging or development sites

A Premium license that is valid for a specific production site can also be used on corresponding staging and development sites. We are initially opening up this capability to the following common subdomains below and your license key will work automatically on these staging or development site subdomains. If you have different staging or development URLs then these will need to be enabled by Wordfence Premium support staff. Please send in your staging or development site URLs via our Premium support ticket system.

staging.example.com
stage.example.com
stg.example.com
new.example.com
dev.example.com
test.example.com
testing.example.com
local.example.com