Site Crawling with Firewall Plugin

[BrandishJay]

Just wondering if anyone has any experience with the WordPress Simple Firewall plugin. I have a client who is concerned about security as they've had issues in that realm in the past and they've since installed this plugin: https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/wp-simple-firewall?filter=4

Problem is, even with a proper robots file and appropriate settings within the firewall, I still cannot crawl the site with site crawler tools.

Google seems to be accessing the site fine, but I still wonder if it is in anyway potentially hindering search spiders.

[RyanPurkey]

I would contact the developer of the plugin for those types of questions. He seems very responsive to people's input on the discussion section of his plugin.  They do serve practical uses though, like preventing comment spam and such, plus your client has been specifically targeted in the past so it seems it is a value add moving forward.

[BrandishJay]

Thanks Ryan. I guess my main concern is not so much running crawlers on the site, but making sure that search engine spiders have completely unrestricted access. In the settings for this plugin you can tell it to "try to ignore search bots". The word try, doesn't really sound all that reassuring to me. Are these type of firewalls even effective at prohibiting attacks? I'd rather just get rid of the plugin all together if the risk vs reward doesn't add up.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Jay. You might have to disable this plugin when crawling the site as it would also create a heavier load than usual when crawling with it on (even if you are able to crawl while it's on).  So a possible interim solution is disable at a low traffic time of day, crawl, then re-enable.  Cheers!