Block individual IPs, allow a trusted whitelist, or control access country-by-country. Guardian Gaze's IP management lets you draw a perimeter around your site and decide exactly who's invited inside. Whitelisted IPs bypass all other security restrictions; blocked traffic never reaches WordPress.
Three independent controls cover the practical cases, blocking a known bad actor, allowing a trusted set of IPs to bypass other restrictions, and shaping traffic by country.
Individual IPs that are denied access. Useful for blocking specific attackers, known malicious sources, and abusive bots. Blocked IPs receive a 403, no further requests reach WordPress.
Trusted IPs that always have access, regardless of other restrictions. Useful for admins, your office network, monitoring services, your home IP. Whitelisted traffic bypasses every blocking rule.
Either allow-list a small set of countries (everything else blocked) or block-list a set of countries (everything else allowed). Uses IP geolocation to detect visitor origin in real time.
Blocking happens at the request layer, before WordPress is even loaded, so a blocked IP costs you almost nothing in server resources. A 403 is returned immediately. No PHP worker is consumed, no database query runs, no plugins load.
Whitelisted IPs are a hard bypass. Whatever other restrictions apply, country blocks, failed-login lockouts, IP reputation blacklisting, the whitelist wins. This makes it safe to apply aggressive restrictions to everyone else without locking yourself out.
Your own home and office IPs · trusted developers' IPs · any monitoring services you run (uptime monitors, security scanners you've authorised) · any external integrations that hit your REST API. Anything else, leave for the deny / geoblock rules to handle.
If your site is a UK-only e-commerce store, a German B2B portal, or a regional service business, more than 95% of attack traffic comes from countries that aren't your customers. Geo-blocking removes that noise from your logs and your scanner findings.
Pick the countries you want to allow (e.g. UK + EU). Everyone else gets blocked at the request layer. The strictest configuration, suited to sites with no legitimate international visitors.
Pick the countries you want to block (e.g. known sources of attack traffic for your industry). Everyone else continues to access normally. The more flexible default, suited to global sites.
Geo-blocking can't reliably detect VPN exit nodes or Tor users, because their IPs may resolve to a permitted country. If your threat model includes determined attackers using VPNs, pair geoblocking with the IP reputation feed (Pro) which tracks known VPN/Tor exit-node ranges.
On the Pro tier and above, Guardian Gaze runs a continuously-updated IP reputation database that pulls from public threat-intelligence feeds, AbuseIPDB, Spamhaus, Project Honeypot, and our own customer telemetry. Known scanner IPs, VPN exit nodes, residential proxies and previously-flagged attacker IPs are pre-blocked before they ever hit your whitelist or geo rules.
| Capability | Free | Pro | Agency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual IP block list | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Manual IP whitelist | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| CIDR range support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Country-level blocking | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Country-level allow-listing | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| IP reputation feed (auto-block known bad) | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bulk import / export (CSV) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-site IP-list sync | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
Manual block lists and whitelists are included on the free tier. Country-level rules and the IP reputation feed are Pro. Install and configure in under five minutes.