We use Wordfence on all of our clients' Wordpress websites. It's an excellent, free security plugin and will protect your site from many possible attacks. You can download it from the Wordpress website here.
However, if you run with the default settings, Wordfence can slow down your website loading time considerably.
When we benchmarked one of our websites on the Pingdom Website Speed Test, we noticed that the Wordfence Live Traffic Logging was taking a huge 3.75 seconds to complete (see screenshot below). This was causing the page to take over 5 seconds in total to load completely - which is far from ideal!
The Live Traffic log can be safely turned off via the Wordfence options screen. The Live Traffic log is used to monitor every single visitor to the website including IP address, country location, page currently being viewed, referring page, etc, etc - in real time. Understandably this causes a slow down on page load time. Unless you need to monitor your website traffic in real time then we would recommend disabling this functionality (you can always turn it back on if you suspect some suspicious activiy and want to monitor the site's visitors for a while).
By turning off Live Traffic in Wordfence this process is completely removed from the page load and therefore 3.75 seconds is saved. Subsequently we are now achieving more acceptable results!...(this is an ecommerce website with multi-lingual translation)
6 responses so far ↓
1 Tanya Delaney // Jul 24, 2015 at 5:43 PM
Thank you so much! I was trying to figure out why Wordfence was slowing us down so much. Turned it off - WHAM - nearly 4 seconds of load time saved.
2 nauka jazdy // Aug 4, 2015 at 11:50 AM
Heya i'm for the first time here. I came across
this board and I find It truly useful & it helped me out much.
I hope to give something back and help others like you helped me.
3 Rob Watson // Jan 28, 2016 at 3:34 PM
Hi Guys - interesting post, which I will look in to as I am using WordFence on my site. Just a quick question - is turning off Live Traffic a premium feature or can you do it with the free version?
Thanks
4 Pakde Pakdoz // Oct 27, 2016 at 5:16 AM
I have same experience, using wordfence slowing down my wordpress site. I noticed without wordfence, I have 48 php queries, but when I installed wordfence, I see about 82 queries. I'm looking for other option, maybe upgrade to Pro plan of Cloudflare.
5 Ian // Sep 30, 2017 at 12:26 PM
Hi,
thanks for this tip.
I add that if you disable automatic scans it doesn't make your website faster but in a 24 hours window the web server and the mysql will benefit especially if your website ha a good traffic audience.
Thanks again,
Ian
6 goedkoop internet // Oct 9, 2017 at 4:51 AM
Als de overheid mij bijvoorbeeld dwingt om de techniek in te gaan...
dan is er een GGZ patient erbij... want 1) dat haat ik..
2) dat kan ik niet.
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