How To Block a Country In WordPress?

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Have you noticed an unexpected influx of unwelcome traffic from a specific country to your website? It may be tourists from a country you don’t represent, or malicious bots trying to hack your site. Whatever the cause, excessive traffic has a negative impact on your website.

It has the ability to slow down your site and deplete your server’s resources. It’s also possible that your website will be hacked. You can block countries in WordPress using a method called Geoblocking if your WordPress site doesn’t need visitors from specific countries.

We’ve gone through the basics of Geoblocking and how to use it on your website in this post.

TL;DR version

Download and install this WordPress Geoblocking Plugin if you want the simplest and most secure way to block unwanted traffic. With just a few clicks, you can pick and block the countries of your choosing.

What Is Geoblocking?

Geoblocking is a technique for preventing IP addresses from specific countries from accessing your website.

An IP address is a number that identifies a machine or other device that connects to the Internet. If anyone visits your website on a laptop, for example, the laptop would have an IP address. You can block the IP address, and anyone using that laptop will be unable to access your site.

Instead of blocking only one IP address, Geoblocking allows you to restrict all IP addresses from a particular country from accessing your WordPress account.

This means that if you block “Canada,” no one from Canada will be able to access your website using any device – computers, cell phones, etc.

For a number of purposes, WordPress site owners block traffic. We’ll go through these explanations briefly because we assume they’ll be useful on your own WordPress pages.

Reasons For Implementing Geoblocking

There are a number of reasons why site owners can need to limit countries. We’ll go over the most popular ones here:

Malicious Traffic

The primary aim of blocking countries in WordPress websites is to prevent rogue users from breaking into your site. Although hackers can be found all over the world, data shows that some countries have a higher concentration of them.

Since 2006, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has discovered that China and Russia have been the leading sources of cyber-attacks. Visitors who are blocked from accessing your site, let alone trying to hack into it, will be unable to do so if geo-blocks are in place.

Local audience

To block in your WordPress account, you may want to cater only locally to a specific country. As a result, traffic from other countries makes no sense for your website. You’ll need to use server resources to display material to these unwanted guests.

Depending on the hosting contract, WordPress hosting providers usually assign limited resources to a website (Whether is it cloud hosting or shared hosting). You’d rather save your money and dedicate it to a more important audience.

Private audience

You may want to limit access to your website to a certain group of people, such as your company’s employees. Geoblocking may be used in this situation to restrict all other countries where you don’t have offices. As a result, you can grant or deny access based on the visitor’s geolocation.
iv. Askew Analytics

You might discover that your analytics are fucked up as a result of a large amount of spam traffic coming from a single country. This may result in inaccurate traffic volume and conversion rate results.

Premium content

Geo blocks are also used on websites that limit access to premium content such as movies and television shows. This is done in order to comply with copyright and licensing agreements. This is what you’d see on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

Price discrimination

Some websites maintain numerous pages for various countries. Pricing will be calculated in each country based on prices, living standards, and other factors. As a result, the owners want to limit access to other nations.

Legal obligations

When it comes to domains as online gambling, laws differ not only by country but also by area. In these situations, websites will have to limit access while still adhering to the applicable laws.

If you’re not sure how to track down the origins of your website’s traffic, we’ve set out the steps for you. You can skip ahead if you want to start stopping traffic right away.

How to Find the Country of Origin of Your Site Traffic?

There are two ways to figure out where the website’s traffic comes from: To block nations, you can use Google Analytics or WordPress plugins.

Using Google Analytics

1. Create a Google Analytics account and add your website.

2. You must build a property for your website. Google has provided a step-by-step guide on how to do so.

3. After that, the dashboard will look like this:
4. After that, scroll down until you see “Sessions by nations.”

5. You can also go to ‘Location summary’ to see more information about the traffic’s roots.

Using a Plugin

IQ Block Country and MalCare are two geo-block plugins that are available. We’ll teach you how to use the WordPress malware scanner plugin in this article.

  • To begin, download MalCare and install it on your website.
  • You must first create an account and link your website to the MalCare dashboard.
  • You’ll see a security choice on the dashboard.

You will also see login requests for MalCare. This is a must-have feature for any WordPress platform that wants to ensure that its login security is up to par.

You can see a list of failed login attempts by clicking on the ‘Show more’ button. You can see which of your login attempts were successful in this section. It will also show a list of failed login attempts along with the username that was used.

The external website we used in the example below only caters to London, with its headquarters in London and no employees employed abroad. As a result, all countries other than England can be ruled out.

If we look at MalCare’s login request report, we can see attempts to log into WordPress admin from a variety of other countries using the username ‘admin.’

The most popular username is Admin, which hackers are well aware of. Fortunately, we modified the username on this WordPress account to something more complicated, so these login attempts failed.

This feature will help you figure out which countries you can block. We want to block the United States, the Russian Federation, and Singapore in this situation.

Let’s take a look at how to make your website geoblockable.

How To Block Countries Using A Plugin?

Geoblocking can be done manually or with the help of a plugin on your WordPress website. We’re going to rule out the manual process right away. This is why: The manual blocking method is time-consuming and challenging.

  • To block individual IP addresses, you’d have to go into your WordPress files and add thousands of lines of code.
  • Plus, messing with the backend files of a WordPress site, such as the htaccess file, puts the site at risk of breaking. This is due to the fact that even the tiniest coding error will cause the entire system to fail.
  • Even if you manually block these pages, hackers can find a way to get around your manual blocks and gain access to your site. They can mask their IP address and access blocked websites by using a proxy server or a VPN.

Instead, using a plugin like MalCare is an easy way to quickly prevent countries from visiting your site.

The procedure is straightforward and fast. Furthermore, the plugin analyses the behavior of the IP address using intelligent signals. If anyone attempts to use a VPN or proxy server, MalCare will search to see if the IP address is malicious and block it.

As a result, blocked country IP addresses are actually blocked, and you won’t have to worry about your website being hacked! Let’s look at how you can use MalCare to enforce Geoblocking on your website. MalCare is used to block nations.

Geoblocking countries using MalCare

Step 1: Register for MalCare and create an account. After that, pick your website.

Step 2: After that select Manage and then click on GeoBlocking.

Step 3: Select which countries you want to block from the dropdown menu. All IP addresses from the countries you specify will be denied access to your website.

Step 4: At the bottom of the page, click the Block Countries button.

That concludes our discussion. Both IP addresses coming in from these IP addresses have been successfully blocked. Your website will no longer appear in the search results for the blocked country. If they go to it by typing the address into the address bar, they’ll probably see something like this:

Unblocking countries using MalCare

If you want to unblock a country, go to the same Geoblocking tab on the website (using Steps 1 and 2). On the right, you’ll see the name of the website with a plus sign.

The countries you’ve blocked will appear when you press the plus sign. Choose the countries you want to unblock and then press ‘Unblock Country.’

Also, if good traffic is unintentionally blocked, see our guide on how to whitelist an IP address.

Last Thoughts

You can serve a targeted audience and block established malicious hackers and bots with the aid of Geoblocking.

After that, you must take action to protect your website from these malicious bots. It will assist you in better serving your target audience by maintaining the protection of their personal information.

We recommend keeping MalCare active on your website to ensure full security. It will provide your site with all-around security, in addition to the Geoblocking functionality. It will search your entire site for malware and hacks on a regular basis. It will also protect your site from known malicious traffic in a constructive manner.

To make your website safer, we recommend that you use WordPress Hardening steps. This will improve your website and ensure that hackers have no chance!