How to Whitelist an IP Address?

Is your firewall interfering with team members’ ability to access your website? Firewalls and security features can stop malicious traffic from accessing your website, they can also unintentionally prevent legitimate traffic from reaching it.

It is relatively simple to resolve this problem if you follow the proper procedures. In this article, we’ll walk you through the method of whitelisting an IP address that is available.

What is IP Address Whitelisting?

Whitelisting IP addresses gives you the ability to control who has access to (or is unable to access) your WordPress website.

Blacklisting is an effective method of ensuring that malicious traffic does not gain access to your website. You can either manually select a malicious IP address and add it to a blacklist, or you can use a firewall to automate the process.

A firewall can be used to filter the traffic that comes to your website. Attempts to access your site by malicious traffic are blocked. However, we have seen instances where firewalls have mistakenly blocked legitimate traffic. 

When a website administrator or team member attempts to access their own site, they are prevented from doing so. IP addresses that have been whitelisted will no longer be blocked and will be able to access your WordPress website once more.

How to Whitelist an IP Address? (Manually & Via Plugin)

There are two methods for adding an IP address to a whitelist. Whitelisting can be done manually or through the use of a plugin. If you want to do it manually, you’ll need to be familiar with the WordPress file system. 

In the absence of this, it is likely that you will make mistakes that will cause your website to be compromised. It is far safer to use a WordPress plugin than to do so manually.

Using a Plugin:

Step 1: Download and install the MalCare Security Plugin for WordPress on your website’s server. Follow our instructions to get your MalCare account up and running.

Step 2: Request that the user whose IP address has been blocked gain access to the website. This attempt will be recorded by MalCare. In addition, the IP addresses will appear in MalCare’s Traffic Request section of the log.

To access the Traffic Request block, sign in to your MalCare dashboard and select your website from the drop-down menu. Navigate to Firewall > Traffic Logs to view the logs. You’ll find a list of the IP addresses that attempted to access your website in this section.

To add an IP address to your whitelist, click on the edit button that appears right next to the IP address you want to add. The IP address will be added to a whitelist.

The MalCare plugin is the quickest and most convenient way to complete this task. However, we recognize that some of our readers may be hesitant to add more plugins to their website and would prefer to complete the process manually instead of using a WordPress plugin.

Why Whitelist IP addresses?

WordPress’s whitelist IP addresses feature restricts dashboard access to only those you know and trust. Your WordPress login page will not be accessible to anyone who has not been granted access to the server. 

As long as you don’t mind copying and pasting a few lines of code, you can easily implement it. IP addresses can be added to a whitelist for a variety of reasons:

• It enhances the security of your WordPress site by analyzing sensitive areas such as the dashboard of your site.
• Access to your site can be restricted by using this tool.
• Your site can only be accessed by IP addresses that have been approved by you.

As a development site, it can be extremely beneficial. While we may be interested in checking out your new website, you may not want the world to know about it until you’re ready for it to go live.

You and other authorized users can access your WordPress site by adding IP addresses to your whitelist. Once you begin, no one else will be able to see it.

Conclusion:

We hope you found our article to be informative. You just need to whitelist IP addresses. A firewall should only be used to prevent malicious traffic from entering your website. It should be intelligent enough to distinguish between bad and good traffic conditions. For example, MalCare includes a Smart WordPress Plugin for Firewall that scans attacks across thousands of websites in order to compile a list of IPs with malicious intent. 

When an IP address attempts to access your website, MalCare checks its list of malicious IP addresses to determine whether or not the requesting party is malicious. Malicious IP addresses are immediately blocked.