WordPress foreign trade website settings: how to block mainland IP access

If your website is primarily geared towards certain specific countries or regions with little or no access from elsewhere, you may notice that there are sometimes unexpected surges in traffic that strain your server resources and disrupt your website's operation.

These anomalous flows often come from hackers or automated bots.

As a result, many webmasters choose to block specific countries or regions by IP address in WordPress, which can help protect the site and visitors from this type of undesirable traffic.

What does geoblocking mean in WordPress?

Before we begin, let's explain the concept of geoblocking in WordPress. Simply put, geoblocking is preventing visitors from certain countries or regions from accessing your website.

This blocking is done by recognizing the IP address of the visitor, and each country or region has its own specific IP address range. For example, if you want to block visitors from China, you need to know the IP address range of China.

For website owners and administrators, geo-blocking is a common way to keep bots at bay. Of course, every website is different and it needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis which countries' traffic may be bots. While there are different opinions on this, Russia and China tend to be the most commonly blocked countries.

Why do I block country IP addresses in WordPress?

There are many reasons why you might want to block people from certain countries or regions from accessing your website.

malicious traffic

Unfortunately, almost all webmasters will eventually face the challenge of malware attacks. These attacks can be as varied as frequent login attempts (brute force) or a large number of requests that cause a site to crash.

If these problems are primarily from a particular region and you have no particular reason to need traffic from there, you may want to consider blocking all access from that country or region.

For example, let's say your e-commerce site doesn't deliver goods to Russia, and at the same time you notice a large amount of malicious traffic from Russia. In this case, you may think that disabling all access from Russia is a safe decision.

Using Wordfence plugin to block domestic IP

What is Wordfence and how does it protect your WordPress site?

Wordfence is a security plugin for WordPress that protects your website from security issues such as hacking, malware, DDOS attacks and brute force cracking.

This plugin provides a web application firewall that is able to inspect all incoming traffic to a website and block requests that look suspicious.

It also includes a malware scanning feature that checks all core files, themes, plugins, and uploaded files on your site for any unusual changes or suspicious code. This is especially useful for cleaning up compromised WordPress sites.

The Wordfence plugin is available in a free version as well as a paid version which includes more advanced features such as blocking access to specific countries/regions, real-time updated firewall rules and scheduled scans.

Next, we will describe how to install and setup Wordfence to block IP addresses in China (e.g. Mainland China).

How do your own Chinese employees access the official website

The Wordfence plugin blocks visitors from China, so when it comes to updating the site, the operations team will need to use a VPN. this is a common operation for those involved in foreign trade.