Country-based access control for WordPress. Restrict access by country, whitelist IP addresses and reduce unwanted traffic.

sf-geoguard

SF GeoGuard is a lightweight country-based access control plugin for WordPress.
It allows you to restrict website access by visitor country using simple ISO country codes (US, CA, GB, etc.), helping reduce unwanted traffic, bot activity, and unnecessary server load.
Main features: 
* Allow access only from selected countries 
* Whitelist IP addresses 
* Cache IP → country lookups for better performance 
* Customize the block message (HTML supported) 
* Choose what happens if the geo service is unavailable (allow or block) 
* Support for sites behind reverse proxies (Cloudflare, Nginx)
SF GeoGuard focuses on doing one thing well: restricting access by country. 
It does not modify WordPress core files and does not load unnecessary scripts on the frontend.
By default, geo checks are applied only to frontend requests. You can optionally 
enable restrictions for wp-admin and wp-login.php in the plugin settings.
<h3>External Services</h3>
This plugin connects to a third-party IP geolocation service to determine 
the visitor’s country based on their IP address.
Service used: 
IP-API (https://ip-api.com/)
Purpose: 
The service is used to detect the visitor’s country in order to apply 
country-based access rules configured in the plugin settings.
Data sent: 
– Visitor IP address
When data is sent: 
– On frontend page load when geo-based access control is enabled 
– Only if the visitor IP address cannot be resolved from the local cache
Note: 
The free IP-API endpoint does not support HTTPS. The plugin uses the HTTP 
endpoint provided by IP-API unless a paid HTTPS plan is used.
Privacy & Terms: 
– Privacy Policy: https://ip-api.com/docs/legal 
– Terms of Service: https://ip-api.com/docs/legal
No personally identifiable information other than the IP address 
is stored, logged, or shared by the plugin.

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