6 Best WordPress Firewall Plugins Compared

Are you looking for the best WordPress firewall plugin for your website?

WordPress firewall plugins protect your website against hacking, brute force attacks, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

In this article, we will compare the best WordPress firewall plugins, and how they stack up against each other.

What is a WordPress Firewall Plugin?

A WordPress firewall plugin (also known as a web application firewall or WAF) acts as a shield between your website and all incoming traffic.

These web application firewalls monitor your website traffic and block many common security threats before they reach your WordPress site.

Aside from significantly improving your WordPress security, these web application firewalls often also speed up your website and boost performance.

There are two common types of WordPress firewall plugins available.

DNS-Level Website Firewall – These firewalls route your website traffic through their cloud proxy servers. This allows them to only send genuine traffic to your web server.

Application Level Firewall – These firewall plugins examine the traffic once it reaches your server but before loading most WordPress scripts. This method is not as efficient as DNS-level firewall in reducing the server load.

In our experience, DNS-level firewalls are more efficient in two major areas:

1. They are quick to catch new threats by tracking thousands of websites, comparing trends, looking for botnets and known bad IPs, and blocking traffic to pages your users would normally never request.
2. DNS-level website firewalls significantly reduce the load on your WordPress hosting server, ensuring that your website does not go down.

Having said that, let’s examine the best WordPress firewall plugins for protecting your website.

1. Sucuri

Sucuri is the leading website security company for WordPress. They offer DNS-level firewall, intrusion, and brute force prevention, as well as malware and blacklist removal services.

All your website traffic goes through their CloudProxy servers, where each request is scanned. Legitimate traffic is allowed to pass through, and all malicious requests are blocked.

Sucuri also improves your website’s performance by reducing server load through caching optimization, website acceleration, and Anycast CDN (all included). It protects your website against SQL injections, XSS, RCE, RFU and all known-attacks.

Setting up their WAF is quite easy. You will need to add a DNS A record to your domain and point them to Sucuri’s CloudProxy instead of your website.

At WPBeginner, we use Sucuri to improve our WordPress security. See how how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3months.

Pricing: Starting from $199.99/year billed annually.

Grade: A+

2. MalCare

MalCare is another top WordPress security plugin and it offers one of the best web application firewalls for WordPress websites. It provides endpoint security, deflecting threats before they reach your site.

MalCare is a plugin-based firewall, which makes it super easy to install. Unlike DNS-based firewalls that require you to tweak configuration settings, you can install MalCare in a few simple clicks.

Most free web application firewalls have generic rules to detect threats, which allow many attacks to pass through. But, MalCare offers a real-time WordPress firewall with specialized rules to block out the worst attacks.

In addition, MalCare has a great bot protection feature that prevents brute force bots, scraper bots, spam bots, and more from attacking your site.

Pricing: Starting from $99/year billed annually. There’s also a free plan that includes basic features.

Grade: A+

3. Cloudflare

Cloudflare is best known for its free CDN service, which includes basic DDoS protection as well.

Their free plan provides basic-protection against common internet threats and hacking attempts. However, it is limited in terms of custom rules you can create for manual blocking.

Note: At WPBeginner we use Cloudflare’s Enterprise plan. See our case study of why we switched from Sucuri to Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is also a DNS-level firewall, which means your traffic goes through their network. This improves performance of your website and reduces downtime in case of unusually high traffic.

The Pro plan only includes DDoS protection against layer 3 attacks. For protection against advanced DDoS layer 5 and 7 attacks, you will need at least their business plan.

Cloudflare has its pros, which include CDN, caching, and a larger network of servers.

The downside is that they do not offer application-level security scans, malware protection, blacklist removal, or security notifications and alerts.

They also do not monitor your WordPress site for file changes and other common WordPress security threats. However, this can be fixed by using a WordPress security scanner plugin.

For more details, see our comparison of Sucuri vs Cloudflare.

Pricing: Free with paid plans starting from $20/month for Pro plan and $200/month for Business.

Grade: A

4. Wordfence Security

Wordfence is a popular WordPress security plugin with a built-in website application firewall. It monitors your WordPress site for malware, file changes, SQL injections, and more. It also protects your website against DDoS and brute-force attacks.

Wordfence is an application level firewall which means that firewall is triggered on your server and bad traffic is blocked after it reaches your server but before loading your website.

This is not the most efficient way to block attacks. Large number of bad requests will still increase load on your server. Because it’s an application level firewall, Wordfence does not come with a content delivery network (CDN).

Wordfence comes with on-demand security scans as well as scheduled scans. It also allows you to manually monitor traffic and block suspicious-looking IPs directly from your WordPress admin area.

To learn more about Wordfence, see our guide on how to install and set up Wordfence security in WordPress.

To get their sophisticated application-level firewall, you really need the Premium version.

Pricing Basic plugin is Free. Premium version pricing starts from $119/year for a single site license.

Grade: B+

5. Jetpack

Jetpack is a popular WordPress plugin that comes with a suite of features including WordPress security and backups. Similar to Wordfence, Jetpack is an application level firewall which means that bad traffic is blocked after it reaches your WordPress hosting server.

Their free plan offers very basic brute force protection and downtime monitoring. You will have to upgrade to at least the Personal plan to unlock daily automated backups and automated spam filtering.

However, to truly unlock the automated malware scanning and security fixes, which is what providers like Sucuri offer, you will have to be on Jetpack professional plan.

Since Jetpack offers a large suite of features, the price tag makes it a very affordable option. But, for a true security firewall, you’re better off going with Sucuri or MalCare.

Pricing: The basic plugin is free. You can also upgrade to the premium security bundle, which starts at $4.95/month.

Grade: B

6. BulletProof Security

BulletProof Security is another popular security and WordPress firewall plugin. It comes with a built-in application-level firewall, login security, database backup, maintenance mode, and several security tweaks to protect your website.

BulletProof security does not offer a very good user experience and many beginners may have difficulty understanding what to do. However, it does come with a setup wizard that automatically updates your WordPress .htaccess files and enables firewall protection.

It does not have a file scanner to check for malicious code on your website. The paid version of the plugin offers extra features to monitor for intrusion and malicious files in your WordPress uploads folder.

Pricing: Free basic plugin. The pro version costs $69.95 for unlimited sites and lifetime support.

Grade: C

Conclusion

After carefully comparing all these popular WordPress firewall plugins, we believe that Sucuri is undoubtedly the best firewall protection you can get for your WordPress site.

It is the best DNS-level firewall with the most comprehensive security features to give you complete peace of mind. In addition, the performance boost you get from their CDN is very impressive.

MalCare would be a close second in our list for the price and value it offers.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress firewall plugin for your website. You may also want to see our ultimate step-by-step WordPress security guide for beginners or our expert picks for the best WordPress activity log and tracking plugins.

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