Maintaining a WordPress site or any other web application requires constant vigilance and time. Automated requests testing your server for vulnerabilities are overwhelming, with thousands coming daily from countries unrelated to your target audience.
For most small-to-medium businesses, this flood of global traffic poses a significant risk with no real benefits. Consider a local dentist in the United States: there is absolutely no legitimate reason for their website to receive login requests or malicious probes from regions like South America, Africa, or Asia. These unsolicited requests are overwhelmingly attempts to damage the application or find entry points for hacking.
Some security solutions allow all visitors initially and block them only after suspicious activity, but we prefer a proactive approach: blocking harmful traffic before it reaches the server.
Implementing geo-blocking to restrict access from regions and countries that don’t benefit the business can significantly reduce malicious traffic. We primarily use Cloudflare for this purpose. This strategy ensures that requests that have no real reason to exist (for example, someone from Afghanistan or France trying to access the login page of a US-based local site) are terminated at the edge. By blocking these requests before they reach the server, we significantly lower system load, enhance performance, and protect our clients’ applications from most random attacks.