Genuine Wordfence is only available on Wordfence.com or from the WordPress Plugin Repository. Given our popularity and excellent reputation, there are unfortunately quite a few nulled or counterfeit versions of Wordfence, and plugins that modify Wordfence in the wild.
Some of these counterfeit plugins are sold as a paid product and claim to provide Wordfence Premium features, but they are simply the free version of Wordfence with the user interface modified to look like it’s paid. Others are sold as a separate plugin that runs alongside Wordfence, and they claim to activate Wordfence Premium, but again they are simply modifying our free version to look like our paid product, but with no access to our newest firewall rules, our malware signatures, our Premium IP blocklist, or any other paid features.
The Premium features that the paid versions of Wordfence provide come from our cloud servers and are not accessible without a paid license key purchased from us. It’s not possible to somehow enable paid features in Wordfence by modifying our source code, without actually purchasing a paid license key from Wordfence.
Downloading nulled versions of Wordfence or Wordfence modifiers is a bad idea for a few reasons:
- Security and Safety: Counterfeit versions of Wordfence can include malware, spyware, backdoors and vulnerabilities. You also won’t receive critical updates to Wordfence that we release. You don’t actually have any Premium Wordfence features – merely the illusion that you have this protection.
- Reliability and Stability: Genuine Wordfence provides a stable and consistent experience on your production website with excellent performance and compatibility with other plugins and configurations you may have. Our QA team spends a lot of time and energy making sure this is the case. Counterfeit versions of Wordfence can be horribly unstable, given that the source is an unethical vendor.
- Access to Updates and Support: While our support team does a spectacular job supporting both our free users and paid customers, we do not support counterfeit versions of Wordfence. We also don’t provide any updates to software that is not Genuine Wordfence.
- Legal and Ethical: We encourage you to support software developers by buying genuine licensed versions of software directly from the vendor. In addition, nulled or counterfeit plugins and modifiers frequently engage in copyright and trademark infringement and we strongly recommend that websites avoid participating in that by using an unethical vendor’s software.
Protect yourself and your WordPress investment by using Genuine Wordfence, and give your site authors and site visitors a secure, stable, high performance and well supported production WordPress website.
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