Free Wordfence: License Installation and Activation

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 beginning development on a new site.

This is an easy 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 general public's favorite option.

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, once the results appear, we will 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 window 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 choose the FREE PLAN.

Next, we will see a message from Wordfence attempting to convince us to pay for its Premium version by highlighting the difference in protection speed. It says more or less 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 30 days later. Are you sure you want to use that 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 evaluate this according to their own level of caution, although it will probably be useful to know whether our site is being attacked so that 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, and 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, ready for activation.

Once everything is working as it should, we will see that this plugin is friendly enough to provide us with a quick tutorial. We recommend watching 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, send us an email at [email protected] detailing the problem or uncertainty. We are here to help.

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