Blocking Malicious IP Addresses in WordPress

Comment spam is a reality that every WordPress website administrator has to deal with. A great article or post is often defaced by spammers and their irrelevant comments. Unfortunately, sometimes this everyday annoyance can escalate and lead to major website security issues, and your website becomes a ripe target for hackers. Security, of course, is one of the prime reasons that people hire a WordPress agency for development.

Regardless, most website owners summon the nuclear option to deal with this. You’re right, we’re talking about blocking IP addresses. On the internet, the IP address is what identifies every device. It’s the address that every device, connected to the network uses when communicating with another one. In this two-part series, we’ll explore the need for blocking IP addresses, and how we can do so. Today, in part 1, we’ll look at why IP blocking becomes necessary, how the concept works, and how we can find malicious IPs that need to be blocked.

Why Block IP Addresses?

The simple answer to that question is that you’d like to protect your website and your visitors from malicious visitors. To elaborate, there are multiple reasons why you would need to blacklist IPs.

Spam Comments

Like we just mentioned, spam comments are something that you need to tackle at some point in your WordPress life. You’ve seen WordPress blog after blog filled with unprofessional and even downright offensive advertisements masquerading as comments, and when we block these users, they just start making new accounts. This is why blocking IP addresses makes sense, as they can’t return to their spamming ways from the same device.

Bots and Trolls

These are the next worst thing after spam comments, and they are aplenty in many comment sections and forums. You want to encourage healthy conversation, and instead, these bots make it difficult for your genuine visitors and users to talk to each other.

Letting in Only Authorized Users

A lot of WordPress websites would love to welcome every visitor on the internet to their website, and for good reason – why turn away a potential customer or user? But, some of us just cater to specific groups of people and we want only them to be able to access our website or comment or use what the website is offering. In this scenario, we can use IP address blocking to keep out visitors that we aren’t a right fit for.

What Happens When an IP Address Is ‘Blocked’?

As we’ve discussed earlier, an IP address works quite like a mailing address, and blocking an IP address from your WordPress website prevents the device with that address from communicating with your website. To do this, we ‘blacklist’ the address.

If you don’t want to blanket-ban an IP address, you can still reduce its privileges – such as preventing it from commenting on your posts or pages – while at the same time, not preventing it from accessing your site. Any reputed WordPress agency for development can help you set up whichever mode of blacklisting you’d like.

Finding Malicious IP Addresses

To blacklist an IP address that’s been giving you trouble, you need to know the IP address itself. To do this in WordPress, you head over to the dashboard, and in the sidebar, select comments. This is where WordPress stores the IP addresses of all users who have ever commented on your website.

The IP address will be visible for each comment under the column marked ‘Author’, along with the email and the username of the commenter. You can note down the IPs that need blocking, so that we can enter these IP addresses in the proper text fields when we learn about blocking them, in the next part of this series. Contact our WordPress development agency if you need assistance with blocking malicious IP addresses.

We hope that this article helped you gain an understanding of IP address blocking and when it is used. In the next part, we’ll go through the steps needed to block IP addresses, and even look at a plugin that can help. Until then, stay safe and stay WordPress-ing!

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