It has now been a few weeks since we launched Wordfence 7. Overall we are confident that the change was a good one. The product is now cleaner, more modern and is much easier for a new user to navigate.
It was, however, a big change, and with that came plenty of questions, feedback and a few unanticipated issues. Thank you to everyone who has provided us feedback. We have read all of it, and are sincerely humbled by how passionate so many of you are about our product.
At this point we have worked through most of the post-launch issues that were discovered. We have released two updates packed with fixes and changes based on feedback. Our support volumes are now back to normal and Wordfence 7 related questions have died down.
With that we wanted to call your attention to a number of things we have either changed or got a lot of feedback on.
The Options Page is Back
This was far and away the topic we got the most feedback on. And the most passionate feedback. While we are still confident that our new approach of aligning settings with features throughout the plugin is the right one, we definitely overlooked the need for admins to quickly configure Wordfence with a minimum number of clicks.
With the release of Wordfence 7.0.3 we added a new page called All Options which you will find in the main Wordfence menu. This page includes 100% of the options available in the plugin.
Prior to Wordfence 7, we did have an options page with most settings, but this only included about 85% of all available options. Your feedback indicated that you wanted that page back so that you can quickly access and configure Wordfence on a single page. We have brought that page back and improved it by making sure that 100% of all options are now on the new “All Options” page included in Wordfence 7.0.3.
This is what it looks like:
Options are grouped by category in collapsible sections. Sections can be expanded and collapsed both individually and as a group using a toggle at the top of the page. We also added a search feature at the top of the page which has proved to be very popular already.
Everything is Still Available
We took literally zero features away with Wordfence 7, free or otherwise. If you’re having a hard time finding something, we swear it’s still there! If you need help chasing it down please contact us via our awesome new Help page and we’ll get you straightened out.
We Added a Toggle for the Expanded Live Traffic View
We love the new condensed Live Traffic view and so do most of you. However, many of you prefer the expanded view, seen below, which is the closest to what things looked like before Wordfence 7. We learned that many people had a hard time finding the option to change the view, so we have now made it more prominent, in the form of a toggle at the top of the page.
You Can Add Live Traffic and Blocking to the Main Wordfence Menu
One of our goals with Wordfence 7 was to simplify the interface, putting more emphasis on the core features and less on the rest. With that in mind we made the tough decision to remove Live Traffic and Blocking from the main Wordfence menu. We knew that a small group of our users would dislike this change. That’s why Wordfence 7 launched with options to add them back.
If you haven’t found that option yet, you can find it in the ‘View Customization’ menu either at Dashboard > Global Options or the All Options page.
What’s on the Horizon
2018 promises to bring many more positive improvements to the Wordfence plugin. We have a really exciting project we are working on to make it much easier to manage Wordfence across multiple sites. If you have any thoughts on that, we would love to hear more in the comments.
In addition we have a long list of ways we plan to use Gravityscan technology to make Wordfence better. We’ll have more to share on those topics as the year progresses.
Thank you very much for your feedback on the Wordfence 7 release. Our team will continue to listen and learn from our customers. Your input is extremely valuable and helps guide and shape Wordfence as it continues to be the most popular firewall and malware scanner for WordPress.
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