CountryLock vs IP Locator

CountryLock provides a simple, lightweight way to allow or block countries from accessing your WordPress site. It’s designed to be “set it and forget it” with no upsells, ads, or complex configurations. ✨ Key Features Master Toggle: Enable or disable the firewall with a single click. Allowed Countries List: Specify which two-letter country codes (e.g., US, CA) are allowed. Everyone else is blocked. Admin Bypass: Logged-in administrators can always bypass the block (toggleable). IP Allowlist: A simple list of IPs or CIDR ranges (like 123.45.67.89 or 10.0.0.0/8) that are always allowed. Block Logging: See which countries and IPs are being blocked (toggleable). Zero-Lookup Detection: Automatically uses Cloudflare (HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY) and other common server-level GEO headers for instant decisions with zero performance impact. Remote Lookup: As a fallback, it can query an external service (ipapi.co) if no headers are found. External Services This plugin uses one external service as a fallback to determine a visitor’s country if no local GEO headers (like those from Cloudflare or a server-level GeoIP module) are present. Service: ipapi.co What it’s used for: To look up the country of origin for a visitor’s IP address. Data Sent: The visitor’s IP address is sent to the service. This happens only if the “Use remote lookup if no geo headers” setting is enabled AND no local GeoIP headers are detected. Service Policies: Terms of Service Privacy Policy

IP Locator is a country and language detection tool for WordPress. It is fast, reliable and plug & play. It can detect and render the country, the main language and the country flag of each visitor of your site. It provides: a strong, accurate and ultra-fast IP and country detection; many shortcodes to display country names, languages and flags (emoji or vectorized); a shortcode to conditionally hide or show strings or other shortcodes; a CSS modifier to add a country-specific class to the body tag of your site; an automatic system to be always up to date (no API key, no IP data files to manually import); a full-featured API for plugins / themes developers. For full details, you can browse the shortcodes list or the API description (for developers). IP Locator can be used too to report the following main items and characteristics: KPIs: number of detected countries and languages, accesses breakdown and detection ratio; countries for real humans with public IPs; languages for real humans with public IPs; metrics variations; metrics distributions; full list of countries per channel; full list of countries per client (requires the free Device Detector plugin). Technically, IP Locator: works on dedicated or shared servers; can detect the source IP even behind proxies or load-balancers; can use AWS CloudFront, Cloudflare and Apache mod_geoip to speed-up detection; natively supports APCu caching(1) and all other dedicated object caching mechanisms, like Memcached or Redis; has a minimal footprint in the page rendering time; runs its data updates in background, without impact on the website speed; is fully compatible with multisites; natively supports names and languages localizations(2). (1): APCu needs to be activated on your server if you want to use it in IP Locator. (2): PHP Intl extension needs to be activated on your server if you want to use it in IP Locator. IP Locator uses IP data I curate myself and I publish via my own servers exclusively for IP Locator. Data is CC0 licensed. IP Locator accesses this service on a regular basis (if the option is checked) to maintain an up-to-date version of the data. IP Locator supports an extensive set of WP-CLI commands to: get location detail: see wp help location describe for details; display IP Locator status: see wp help location status for details; toggle on/off main settings: see wp help location settings for details; display location and languages statistics: see wp help location analytics for details. For a full help on WP-CLI commands in IP Locator, please read this guide. IP Locator is part of PerfOps One, a suite of free and open source WordPress plugins dedicated to observability and operations performance. IP Locator is a free and open source plugin for WordPress. It integrates many other free and open source works (as-is or modified). Please, see ‘about’ tab in the plugin settings to see the details. Developers If you’re a plugins / themes developer and want to take advantage of the detection features of IP Locator, visit the GitHub repository of the plugin to learn how to use it. Support This plugin is free and provided without warranty of any kind. Use it at your own risk, I’m not responsible for any improper use of this plugin, nor for any damage it might cause to your site. Always backup all your data before installing a new plugin. Anyway, I’ll be glad to help you if you encounter issues when using this plugin. Please read carefully the FAQ at the bottom of this page before requesting support. Privacy This plugin, as any piece of software, is neither compliant nor non-compliant with privacy laws and regulations. It is your responsibility to use it – by activating the corresponding options or services – with respect for the personal data of your users and applicable laws. This plugin doesn’t set any cookie in the user’s browser. This plugin may handle personally identifiable information (PII). If the GDPR or CCPA or similar regulation applies to your case, you must adapt your processes (consent management, security measure, treatment register, etc.). Donation If you like this plugin or find it useful and want to thank me for the work done, please consider making a donation to La Quadrature Du Net or the Electronic Frontier Foundation which are advocacy groups defending the rights and freedoms of citizens on the Internet. By supporting them, you help the daily actions they perform to defend our fundamental freedoms!