Hi @pasqualerose,
Wordfence as an endpoint firewall cannot prevent requests being made to your site in the first place, but rather deal with them appropriately once they arrive based on our firewall’s decision making in conjunction with your settings. In “Extended Protection” Wordfence will run immediately after PHP starts, but before the WordPress content and other plugins load. This is to prevent too much content being served to IPs that need to be blocked.
If you’re receiving true DDoS, or at the very least a huge increase in attempted page views that affects performance, protection at the server’s end such as Cloudflare (as one example you mention) should be the most effective solution. Wordfence is designed for defense in depth by giving you a layered approach to security with its range of features. That is to say other protection on your server is a perfectly reasonable strategy for any security-conscious administrator.
You can read more about our Brute Force and Rate Limiting settings in our help documentation. I generally set my Rate Limiting rules to these values to start with:
Rate Limiting Screenshot
- If anyone’s requests exceed – 240 per minute
- If a crawler’s page views exceed – 120 per minute
- If a crawler’s pages not found (404s) exceed – 60 per minute
- If a human’s page views exceed – 120 per minute
- If a human’s pages not found (404s) exceed – 60 per minute
- How long is an IP address blocked when it breaks a rule – 30 minutes
I also always set the rule to Throttle instead of Block. Throttling is generally better than blocking because any good search engine understands what happened if it is mistakenly blocked and your site isn’t penalized because of it. Make sure and set your Rate Limiting Rules realistically and set the value for how long an IP is blocked to 30 minutes or so.
With Brute Force settings, I recommend trying 3-5 for attempts and password resets, counted over 4 hours, with a 30 minute (or longer) lockout time period.
Remember there is no hard and fast, one-size-fits-all set of rules for every site. This is just a good place to start. During an attack you may want to make those rules stricter. If you see visitors, like search engine crawlers getting blocked too often, you might want to loosen them up a little.
Many thanks,
Peter.
Thank you! I watched the videos and I did go in and change my settings. Hopefully that will allow me to loosen up things with Cloudflare some so that each visitor to the site doesn’t get a message asking them to verify they are human. This way say, visitors won’t be confused or annoyed by this.
No worries @pasqualerose, glad we could help! If you have any Wordfence questions in the future by all means start up a new topic here any time.
Peter.
