When you first install Wordfence you are automatically configured to have the free version. Wordfence will contact our servers and automatically fetch a free license key which saves you having to come to our site and register. This gets you set up with our product as fast as possible.

If you decide to upgrade to the Premium version of Wordfence, you will need to go to wordfence.com, open the “Products” > “Premium” page, and press the “Buy Now” button. When you purchase Premium you will receive a Premium license key found under the LICENSES page in your account.

Real-time protection

Wordfence Premium customers receive new firewall rules the moment our threat intelligence team releases them. When attackers invent new techniques to exploit WordPress, we deploy firewall rules to protect our Premium customers in real-time. With Wordfence Premium, you are protected from the newest exploits as we discover them.

Wordfence Premium customers also receive new malware detection capabilities in real-time. Our team writes detection signatures for new malware variants and immediately deploys those signatures to your Wordfence installation, giving you the ability to detect even the newest malware. Our malware signatures are used by your firewall to prevent hackers from uploading malware, and they are used by your Wordfence scanner to detect any malware in your filesystem.

Country blocking

Country blocking is a Premium feature that allows you to restrict access to your login page or the whole site from specific countries. You can read more about country blocking here.

Real-time IP blocklist

Users of both the free and Premium versions of Wordfence can choose to participate in the “Wordfence Security Network”. This allows us to track the malicious behavior of specific IP addresses on a large number of sites. When we detect that an IP address is behaving maliciously, it is automatically added to the Wordfence “Real-Time IP Blocklist”. The Real-Time IP Blocklist is a Premium feature of Wordfence that completely blocks access to your site from these IP addresses.

Note that users of the free version of Wordfence will only receive automatic blocking of IP addresses that have been engaged in brute force login attacks detected via the Wordfence Security Network. Premium users of the plugin will receive additional automatic blocking of IP addresses carrying out other complex attacks via the Real-Time IP Blocklist feature. You can read more about the Wordfence Security Network here.