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Allow or disallow visitors from certain countries accessing (parts of) your website
iQ Block Country is a WordPress plugin designed to control access to your website based on the geographic location of visitors. You can allow or disallow access from specific countries, which can help manage unwanted traffic and enhance security. The plugin uses the GeoLite database from MaxMind for location data, providing a high level of accuracy for a free service.
This plugin is suitable for website owners who want to restrict access to their content based on visitor location. It allows for detailed control, including the ability to block entire countries or specific IP addresses, and offers options for custom messages or redirects for blocked visitors. However, it is important to note that while it can reduce unwanted visitors, it cannot guarantee complete security against determined attempts to access your site.
Best for: Website owners looking to restrict content access based on geographic location.
What it does well
Where it falls short
iQ Block Country provides useful tools for managing visitor access based on location, but it requires some setup and cannot ensure total security.
Pascal's own description of iQ Block Country, lightly tidied.
iQ Block Country is a plugin that allows you to limit access to your website content. You can either allow or disallow visitors from defined countries to (parts of) your content.
For instance if you have content that should be restricted to a limited set of countries you can do so.
If you want to block rogue countries that cause issues like for instance hack attempts, spamming of your comments etc you can block them as well.
Do you want secure your WordPress Admin backend site to only your country? Entirely possible! You can even block all countries and only allow your ip address.
And even if you block a country you can still allow certain visitors by putting their ip address on the allow list just like you can allow a country but put ip addresses on the block list from that country.
You can show blocked visitors a message which you can style by using CSS or you can redirect them to a page within your WordPress site. Or you can redirect the visitors to an external website.
You can (dis)allow visitors to blog articles, blog categories or pages or all content.
Stop visitors from doing harmful things on your WordPress site or limit the countries that can access your blog. Add an additional layer of security to your WordPress site.
This plugin uses the GeoLite database from Maxmind. It has a 99.5% accuracy so that is pretty good for a free database. If you need higher accuracy you can buy a license from MaxMind directly.
If you cannot or do not want to download the GeoIP database from Maxmind you can use the GeoIP API website available on https://webence.net/
If you want to use the GeoLite database from Maxmind you will have to download the GeoIP database from MaxMind directly and upload it to your site.
The WordPress license does not allow this plugin to download the MaxMind Geo database for you.
Please be aware that although this plugin can help you greatly with reducing the number of ‘bad’ visitors on your website it is not fool proof and those who really want to visit your site may find a away.
This is not a security issue but a simple fact of today. Nobody can guarantee you 100% security as it is a constant battle between the good guys and the bad guys.
If you are sure your webhosting or yourself does not use any form of caching or proxying we recommend setting the “Override IP information” on the Home tab to REMOTE_ADDR
Do you need help with this plugin? Please email support@webence.net.
This plugin stores data about your visitors in your local WordPress database. The number of days this data is stores can be configured on the settings page. You can also disable logging any data.
Data which is stored of blocked visitors:
Data which is stored on non blocked visitors:
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