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!

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