How to activate and configure Wordfence

What is Wordfence? It is a plugin developed for WordPress sites that provides significant security improvements for our website. In fact, many administrators install it almost as a first step when starting development of a new site.

This is an easy-to-follow guide that explains, step by step, how to implement it on our site.

Installing Wordfence for free

Fortunately, although Wordfence has a paid PRO version, it also offers us a free alternative that, honestly, is the option preferred by the general public.

To install this free version, which is recommended for any site in general, we will go to Plugins → Add Plugin.

Next, we will search for "Wordfence" in the search field and, after getting the results, install the plugin shown in the screenshot below.

Note that after the plugin has been downloaded to our site, the same "Install Now" button will change to "Activate." We will click it again.

We will then see a pop-up screen asking us to obtain a license. Don't worry—we don't have to pay anything!

Click the blue GET YOUR WORDFENCE LICENSE button.

We don't have to pay anything.

On the plans screen, we will simply select the FREE PLAN.

Next, we will see a message from Wordfence trying to convince us to pay for its Premium version, highlighting the difference in protection speed. It says roughly the following:

Our firewall blocks attacks that attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in plugins, themes, and the WordPress core. In addition, we have systems that detect whether your site has been infected with malware, so we simply recommend using the free version on our servers.

The free version is still secure, but it receives updates with a 30-day delay. Are you sure you want to use this free version?

We will ignore this sales pitch by clicking the text indicated in the screenshot below.

Next, we will create an account by entering our email address. We can also decide whether we want to receive alerts at that email address (Yes/No); each person can assess this according to their level of caution, although it is probably advisable to know whether our site is being attacked so we can take action.

Finally, we must accept the Terms and Conditions by checking the box before the Register button.

After a few seconds, our account will have been created, so we will receive the product license key at the email address we entered.

When checking our email, we will find a message similar to the following. The good news is that we only need to click the indicated button for the product key to be loaded "magically" into our plugin in WordPress.

Indeed, after clicking, our Dashboard will open with the key already loaded and ready for activation.

With everything working as it should, we will see that this plugin is friendly enough to provide us with a quick tutorial. It is recommended that you watch it since it only takes a few seconds.

The newly installed Wordfence plugin already contains all the basic protection settings, so unless we have advanced development experience with fine-tuning WordPress, we should not change anything.

Of course, if you have any questions, email us at [email protected] with details about the problem or uncertainty. We are here to help.

This is the end of this Wordfence tutorial. We hope it has been useful and wish you success in your online ventures. Thank you for reading.