For any website, security is the topmost priority. And when it comes to WordPress security plugins, Wordfence is one of the most popular security plugins currently available on the market.
It’s an all-in-one approach like a Web Application Firewall, security scanner, and all other features that help to protect your site from many possible attacks. Even after having so many great qualities, some webmaster finds this plugin slow down their website. Is it really so? Does Wordfence slow down website automatically?
These are some common questions that many people wonder about while thinking about using this plugin. Well, I’ll discuss this issue in detail in this guide. Are you ready to know more? If yes, then without further delay, let’s get into the discussion.
Does Wordfence Slow Down Website?
This plugin comes with a wealth of features, which makes it more resource-heavy than most. The default installation of Wordfence’s older versions used to come with a very high level of scanning. Instead of scanning gigabytes of files like images, .zip backups, and more by default, it scans them repeatedly.
It is used to track and log every single visit to your site and to distinguish between humans and bots, it does some additional checks for regular page visits. The live traffic log feature of this plugin monitors all the visitor’s IP addresses, country locations, referring pages, pages currently being viewed, and so on.
This process is ok for sites with low traffic. But, sites with high traffic may have noticeably slow loading issues with Wordfence. Again, when you install Wordfence in your basic entry-level hosting, it may add to performance issues.
These are the main causes of this plugin to make your site slow down. This implies the slow loading speed is related to the default settings of Wordfence. If you run your site with the default settings of Wordfence, it will slow down your site.
And, this leads me to the next section.
What To Do If Wordfence Slows Down Your Website?
Fortunately, by changing the default setting, you can make sure Wordfence doesn’t slow down your site. You can simply change the configuration options to mitigate the impact on the performance of scanning and security checks. So, let’s find out what you should do if Wordfence slows down your site.
- If your site is on cheap entry-level hosting, then you can upgrade it to a better host.
- Go to the Dashboard, click on the option called “Manage Scan”. Then you’ll find three default options like limited scan, standard scan, and high sensitivity. You’ll see that the standard scan will be auto-selected, simply drop this down to the limited scan.
- Unless you need to monitor your site traffic in real-time, you can Turn Off the Live Traffic View. You can turn it back whenever needed to monitor the site’s visitors for a while.
- Comment scanning is enabled by default, so, if you don’t need comments on your site, you can disable it.
- From the “Scans to include” section, uncheck Scan images, binary, and other files as if they were executable.
Conclusion
Wordfence is really a great WordPress firewall and security scanner plugin. It comes with a premium API key that gives real-time updates to the threat defense feed. With this plugin, your site will stay protected from getting hacked by malicious traffic.
But with the default setting, it can slow down your website, which you can resolve by keeping the setting tight as your accordance. In this guide, I’ve shared how does wordfence slow down website and how you can resolve them.
Hopefully, you’ve liked this guide and find it useful to fix the page loading issue by Wordfence. Don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comment section below about this guide. And if you have any service-related queries, do Contact Us.
This is the end of this guide, so, start resolving the loading issue and have your WordPress site back to offer faster loading speed in no time. All the best!
