ShieldUp – Bad Bots, Scrapers, Attackers vs Shield Security – Smart Bot Blocking, Brute-Force Login Protection & File Scanning

Tired of bad bots, scrapers, attackers and sluggish website performance? By providing real-time monitoring of accessing IPs, HTTP codes, URLs, and user agents, organized analytics, customizable timeline and visualizations, ShieldUp will help you indentify and combat threats like bad bots, scrapers, malicous attackers. Which will improve website security and performance by reducing the load on your server resources for a snappy website and great user experience. Key Features 🛡️ Advanced Security: ShieldUp protects your site from malicious bots, scrapers, attackers and hackers, shielding your website from potential threats. 🚀 Optimized Performance: Improve website speed and user experience by eliminating unnecessary requests from scrapers, bad bots and brute force attackers 🗃️ Comprehensive Data Collection: ShieldUp logs and archive accessing IPs, HTTP response codes, URLs, user agents, timestamps, etc. 📊 Detailed Data Insights: ShieldUp will analyze, organize and displays IP data based on IP ranges, request counts, details, offering a comprehensive view of your traffic within user-friendly tables. 📅 Custom Time Period: Select specific time ranges through an intuitive calendar feature for in-depth data analysis. 📈 Visualize Data: Easily visualize traffic trends and patterns with our user-friendly graphs. 🛠️ IP Tools: Helps you with actions like retrieving detailed IP information from DB or third-party tools. 🌐 Cloudflare Integration (Pro): Seamlessly connect your website to Cloudflare, enhancing security and performance even further by leverage Cloudflare’s powerful features. ⚙️ Advanced IP Management (Pro): Take control with a click. Manage IPs and IP ranges effortlessly, with actions like blocking, JavaScript challenges, whitelisting, or remove rules using Cloudflare’s firewall through the plugin. 💼 Centralized IP Database (Pro): Keep all IPs controlled by your WP plugin and Cloudflare in a centralized database for efficient management and tracking. 📝 User Activity Logging (Pro): Maintain detailed logs of all IP controls by users, ensuring accountability and providing a historical record of security actions. 🏆 Priority Support (Pro): Pro members get priority support, so you can expect quick help with any questions or issues. Please Note: Yes, the Pro version is undeniably impressive. However, the free version is really what you need and will get the job done. How it works 1. Installation and Activation Start by downloading and installing the ShieldUp plugin. Once activated, it seamlessly integrates with your WordPress, ready to work its magic. 2. Data Collection ShieldUp starts by collecting crucial data about the traffic to your website. It keeps a record of accessing IPs, including HTTP response codes, URLs, user agents, and timestamps. This data is organized into user-friendly tables and presented through interactive graphs, allowing you to gain valuable insights into your website’s traffic patterns. 3. Select, Organize and Display Data You can choose a specific time frame, making it easy to identify which IPs are accessing your site the most. It also groups IPs into /16 and /24 ranges and along with graphical representation helps you visualize trends, spot unusual activity and potential security threats. 4. Cloudflare Integration (Pro) ShieldUp seamlessly integrates with Cloudflare in PRO version, enhancing your website’s security even further. Using the Cloudflare API, you can manage IPs and IP ranges right from your WordPress dashboard. Implement blocks, JavaScript challenges, whitelist entries, or remove rules with just a few clicks. 5. IP Tools & IP Management Each IP listed in the user-friendly interface comes with action buttons, enabling you to ban IPs in your website’s firewall or CloudFlare, retrieve detailed IP information from third-party tools, and perform other custom actions. 6. Enhanced Security ShieldUp employs advanced security measures to protect your website from a wide range of threats. It identifies and blocks malicious bots, scrapers, attackers, and hackers, ensuring that your website remains secure. 7. Optimized Website Performance In addition to security, ShieldUp optimizes your website’s performance. It achieves this by filtering out unnecessary requests from bad bots, scrapers and other unwanted traffic. This optimization reduces the load on your server resources, resulting in a snappy and responsive website and great user experience. Firewalls, What we recommend? One of the best options would be a hardware-type firewall, but we wouldn’t be in this situation if we had one. The next best option for managing HTTP and HTTPS traffic is a cloud-based firewall, such as CloudFlare, especially when it is available for free and offers a wide range of excellent features. In addition to that, we also use CSF for other security solutions and to manage traffic and ports related to services like mail and SSH. So, why do we think CloudFlare is a better solution for HTTP and HTTPS trafic, than “Traditional” Server/Software-Based Firewall (CSF) especially Plugin-Like Firewalls (WordPress Plugins)? Traditional firewalls, while valuable, have limitations when compared to Cloudflare’s robust security and performance capabilities. These firewalls primarily protect your server or website by consuming server resources, leaving them vulnerable to large-scale attacks, among other things. In contrast, Cloudflare operates a global network that defends against threats at the network edge, providing superior DDoS protection and accelerated content delivery. By choosing Cloudflare, you gain a comprehensive, cloud-based solution that strengthens your website’s resilience and speed, effectively surpassing the capabilities of traditional local firewalls when it comes to HTTP and HTTPS trafic. Here are some of the main features of CloudFlare: Global Network Security: Cloudflare operates a vast global network that acts as a protective shield for your website, filtering out malicious traffic and threats before they even reach your server. This distributed approach ensures that attacks are mitigated at the network edge, preserving your server resources. Content Caching: Cloudflare’s caching infrastructure stores copies of your website’s content at data centers around the world. This means visitors experience faster load times as they access cached content from a server nearest to them, reducing server load and improving website responsiveness. Web Application Firewall (WAF): Cloudflare offers a comprehensive Web Application Firewall that can be finely tuned to your specific needs. It provides a robust defense against common web application attacks, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), without the need for additional on-site firewall plugins. IP Control and Access Management: Cloudflare’s firewall allows you to control and manage IP access with precision. You can easily set rules to block or allow specific IPs, IP ranges, or countries, giving you granular control over who can access your website. DDoS Protection: Cloudflare’s network is designed to withstand large-scale DDoS attacks, providing a shield against volumetric threats that would overwhelm on-site firewalls. This ensures uninterrupted website availability. Performance Optimization: Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) optimizes the delivery of your website’s assets, including images, scripts, and stylesheets, resulting in reduced latency and faster load times for your visitors. Scalability and Reliability: Cloudflare’s infrastructure is highly scalable and redundant, ensuring that your website remains available even during traffic spikes or server failures. By integrating Cloudflare with your WordPress site, you not only enhance security but also optimize performance, reduce server load, and simplify IP access control, all while benefiting from Cloudflare’s global network and advanced security features. It’s a comprehensive solution that takes your website’s protection and performance to the next level. This is why we use it on all our websites, including the Pro version of this plugin as well. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you use it for your website if you haven’t already, whether you intend to use this plugin or not. Please note that we still use and recommend that you use a ‘Traditional’ server/software-based firewall like CSF, in conjunction with CloudFlare, to cover various security aspects such as traffic/ports for mail, FTP, SSH, etc.

Most security plugins hand you a dashboard full of alerts and expect you to know what to do next. Shield works differently. It blocks threats automatically, repairs what it can on its own, and then shows you exactly what still needs your attention — ranked by impact, not volume. Less noise. More action. 🤖 Security That Runs Itself The most powerful thing Shield does is what it handles without you: Automatic IP Blocking — every visitor is quietly scored as they interact with your site. Failed logins, firewall blocks, silentCAPTCHA failures, and other signals accumulate into a reputation score. When a visitor’s score crosses the threshold, Shield blocks them — automatically, without you lifting a finger Automatic File Repair — when a file integrity scan finds a changed WordPress core file, Shield pulls the original from WordPress.org and restores it. Detected and fixed, without waiting for you to act Automatic Bot Recognition — Shield identifies legitimate crawlers (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Apple) and known services (ManageWP, Pingdom, Stripe, CloudFlare) and never blocks them. Your SEO and monitoring tools keep working 🧭 Guided Security, Not Just a Dashboard Shield organises your security into four focused areas so you always know where to look: Queue — things that need your attention, ranked by priority. Not everything at once — just what matters right now Investigate — dig into blocked IPs, security events, and the specific signals that triggered each one Configure — guided setup for each protection area, with clear recommendations matched to your site Reports — a clear view of what Shield has blocked, detected, and repaired over time The goal: guide you quickly towards action, not bury you in data. 🛡️ Free Protection Bot Blocking & Firewall silentCAPTCHA — blocks bad bots on login, registration, lost password, and comment forms using passive signals invisible to real visitors. No CAPTCHA keys. No external requests. No JavaScript that breaks your forms. Everything runs on your server (GDPR friendly). Firewall rules blocking common WordPress attack patterns — SQL injection probes, known exploit signatures, suspicious request parameters XML-RPC protection — disable or restrict entirely, including pingbacks and trackbacks REST API firewall — block unauthenticated requests Fake crawler detection — identifies bots spoofing legitimate search engines Login & Account Security Two-factor authentication (2FA) — email codes, Google Authenticator, or YubiKey OTP for all users Brute force protection with configurable login attempt limits and cooldown Session locking — tie sessions to a browser or IP to stop account theft after a successful login User enumeration blocking — closes off ?author= probes used to harvest usernames before an attack Scanning & Integrity Core file scanning — compares WordPress core against official checksums and repairs changed files automatically Suspicious PHP detection — flags PHP files in locations where they have no business being Abandoned plugin detection — identifies unmaintained plugins most likely to carry unpatched vulnerabilities Visibility & Control Security Admin PIN — lock Shield’s own settings so other administrators cannot quietly weaken your configuration Security activity log — logins, user changes, plugin and theme events, post edits, and suspicious requests: Everything in one clear view IP Rules — automatic & manual block and bypass rules, CIDR range support, full per-IP request history 🤝 CrowdSec Integration Shield is the only WordPress security plugin with a native CrowdSec integration. CrowdSec aggregates threat signals from millions of sites into a shared IP reputation network — your site blocks known attackers before they ever probe you, using intelligence far beyond your own traffic history. ✨ ShieldPRO Passkeys — phishing-resistant, passwordless login for users Backup login codes — emergency 2FA access when a device is lost AI-based malware scanner — detects known and unknown PHP malware Plugin & theme file scanning — compares installed files against WordPress.org originals, flagging unauthorised changes Vulnerability scanning — active checks across all installed plugins and themes Broader spam protection — WooCommerce, EDD, Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, Elementor, and more Traffic rate limiting — cap request rates per IP to absorb high-volume bot floods User suspension — manual or automatic suspension of idle accounts MainWP integration White Label — rename and rebrand Shield for client sites Who It’s For Shield suits site owners, agencies, and MSPs who want protection that runs itself — not a plugin that demands constant attention to be useful. If you have been burned by security plugins that generate more noise than protection, or dashboards that tell you everything is wrong without telling you what to fix, Shield was built to be the alternative.