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From $39/year — 14-day money-back

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v3.3.2
[B] 404 Bot Blocker

[B] 404 Bot Blocker

The 404-pattern firewall that catches what generic security plugins miss.

  • Auto-blocks IPs that abuse your 404s — configurable threshold, monitoring window and lockout duration
  • SEO-safe: Googlebot, Bingbot & friends are explicitly allow-listed and never throttled
  • Detects 30+ headless scanners (HeadlessChrome, Selenium, Puppeteer, sqlmap, nikto…) without breaking legitimate headless WP
4.9
(87 reviews)

About the plugin

Your 404 log is a crime scene. Most plugins ignore it.

Every WordPress site on the public internet gets hit, every single day, by a swarm of automated scanners hunting for forgotten backup files, leaked credentials and known-CVE attack surfaces. They probe paths like /wp-config.php.bak, /.env, /admin.rar, /wp-content/uploads/db.sql — and the second one of those returns a 200, your site is owned.

Your generic security plugin doesn’t see it. Your CDN doesn’t care. Your WAF only flags the obvious. Meanwhile, the bots cycle through millions of paths until something sticks — and you find out three days later, when Google blacklists your domain.

[B] 404 Bot Blocker fixes that — surgically.

It’s a focused, enterprise-grade firewall built around a single insight: real visitors don’t generate 30 404s in 60 seconds. Bots do. When an IP crosses the threshold you configure, it’s banned at the WordPress bootstrap layer (before any heavy code runs), with a 403 served on every subsequent request — including wp-login.php.

What makes it different

  • Zero false positives for SEO. Googlebot, Bingbot, AhrefsBot and friends are explicitly allow-listed. Their crawls never count.
  • Headless detection that doesn’t break headless WordPress. We catch HeadlessChrome, Selenium, Puppeteer, sqlmap, nikto and 30+ scanner signatures — without blocking your own staging tools.
  • CIDR ranges in whitelist and blocklist. Add 192.168.0.0/24 for the office network, 2001:db8::/32 for an IPv6 transit, done.
  • Cloudflare / reverse-proxy aware. Honours CF-Connecting-IP and X-Forwarded-For when you opt in — and screams in the admin UI when proxy headers are detected but trust is off (a silent misconfiguration that makes most WP firewalls useless).
  • Audit log with WP-Cron retention. Every blocked request is logged with IP, URL, User-Agent and timestamp. Daily cron prunes rows past your retention window. Streamed CSV/TXT export with formula-injection protection.
  • Manual block manager. One-click unblock, promote a temporary ban to permanent, or whitelist instantly — all from a dedicated tab.
  • GDPR & LGPD compliant out of the box. Suggested privacy text, data exporter and eraser plug straight into Tools → Export / Erase Personal Data.
  • Self-lockout protection. Server-side guard refuses to ban your own IP. Admins are excluded from the 404 counter. You will never lock yourself out.

What it is not

It’s not a 50-MB Swiss-army-knife security plugin with malware scanners, two-factor, login captchas and a cluttered dashboard. It does one thing — stopping bots that abuse 404s — and it does that better than anything else on the market. Use it standalone, or layer it under Wordfence/iThemes for an extra perimeter that doesn’t overlap.

Built for production

  • ~280 KB on disk. 27 files. No Composer dependencies at runtime.
  • 52 PHPUnit tests, 100% passing — we ship the test suite in our repo.
  • Translated into 4 languages: English, Spanish (Castilian), Brazilian Portuguese, Galician. POT included.
  • WPCS-compliant code, full PHPDoc, every function nonce-guarded and capability-checked.
  • Update delivery via the [B] License Manager — no WordPress.org dependency, no public exposure.

The firewall never stops working when your license lapses. A security plugin that disables itself on payment failure is malpractice. Yours keeps protecting; only the update channel goes silent.

Benefits

Protection at boot time

Bans are enforced in the WordPress bootstrap, before themes, page builders or e-commerce code runs. A blocked bot eats less CPU than serving a 404.

SEO-safe by design

Real search-engine crawlers are allow-listed by User-Agent and IP signature. We tested with sites pushing 100k+ Google crawl requests per day. Zero false positives.

Sub-millisecond runtime cost

Reads through Transients API, writes batched, log queries index-backed. The plugin is invisible on the front-end performance budget.

Self-lockout proof

Three independent guard rails make it physically impossible to ban your own admin IP. Sleep at night.

GDPR & LGPD ready

Privacy-policy text, personal-data exporter and personal-data eraser plug into WP core privacy tools. No third-party data sharing — ever.

Stays protecting on lapsed license

If your subscription ends, the firewall keeps working. Only the update channel goes silent. Security is never gated by billing.

Cloudflare-aware

Honours CF-Connecting-IP and X-Forwarded-For when you trust them — and warns you in the admin if you forgot to enable trust on a proxied site.

Built like a real product

52 PHPUnit tests, WPCS-clean, full PHPDoc, accessible admin UI with ARIA labels, 4 bundled translations and a POT file you can extend.

Available plans

Starter

39.00 / /year

1 site

Buy

Pro

79.00 / /year

5 sites

Buy

Agency

149.00 / /year

25 sites

Buy

Lifetime

349.00 / one-time

Unlimited sites

Buy

How does [B] 404 Bot Blocker compare?

Honest comparison vs. the most common alternatives WordPress site owners try.

Feature [B] 404 Bot Blocker Other solutions
Detects bots by 404 patterns (not just User-Agent) Yes — threshold, window and lockout fully configurable Mostly UA-based or generic rate-limiting
Allow-lists Googlebot & SEO crawlers automatically Built-in, signed UA fingerprinting Often requires manual rule tuning
CIDR support (IPv4 + IPv6) in whitelist & blocklist Native, with binary-comparison validation Single IPs only on most plugins
Cloudflare-aware with misconfiguration warning Detects proxy headers and warns if Trust-Proxy is off Silently bans the whole CF range or trusts spoofable headers
Self-lockout protection Three independent guard rails "Lost access? Disable via FTP." 🙃
GDPR / LGPD exporter + eraser Registered with WP core privacy tooling out of the box Almost nobody ships this; you have to write it yourself
Firewall keeps working on expired license Always — security is never gated by billing Many premium security plugins disable rules on lapse
Footprint 27 files, ~280 KB on disk, 0 runtime Composer deps Suite plugins ship 30–80 MB and load on every request
PHPUnit test coverage shipped 52 tests / 67 assertions, 100% passing Closed-source binary blob

How it works

1

Install & activate

Upload the ZIP via Plugins → Add New → Upload, or drop the folder into wp-content/plugins/. Activate. The default settings (threshold 30, window 60s, lockout 1h, retention 30d) are production-ready.

2

Activate your license

Go to Settings → [B] 404 Security → License, paste the key from your purchase email, click Activate. Updates are now delivered automatically. (The firewall already runs without this step — the license only enables update delivery.)

3

Tell us if you're behind a proxy

If your site sits behind Cloudflare, AWS ALB or any reverse proxy, toggle "Trust Proxy Headers" in Settings. The plugin will warn you with a red banner if you forget — better a loud reminder than silently banning your entire CF range.

4

Tune to your traffic profile

Watch the Dashboard for a couple of days. If you see legitimate traffic getting flagged, raise the threshold. If bots are slipping through, lower the window. Defaults work for 95% of sites; the other 5% just need a knob nudge.

5

Forget about it

Logs auto-prune. WP-Cron handles retention. The Block manager is there if you ever need to un-ban a customer who fat-fingered their address bar 30 times. Otherwise, the plugin works in the background, every minute of every day.

Detailed features

Full Documentation

Configuration reference, threshold tuning guide, multisite notes and troubleshooting matrix at https://baqueiro.es/store/plugins/b-404-bot-blocker/docs/

Developer Hooks Reference

Filters and actions for extending threshold logic, customising the 403 response page and integrating with external SIEMs.

PHPUnit Test Suite

52 tests covering CIDR validation, IP-list parsing, IPv6 canonicalisation, comments, CRLF tolerance and CSV-injection sanitisation. Run them yourself: `composer install && vendor/bin/phpunit`.

Translations & POT

110 strings extracted, 4 bundled locales (en_US, es_ES, pt_BR, gl_ES). Drop your own .po into /languages/ and you're done.

Priority Support

Direct email line to the developer team — not a tier-1 outsourced helpdesk. 24h response on business days.

Privacy & GDPR Notes

Plain-language documentation of exactly which fields are stored, retention windows, exporter/eraser usage and the legal basis under GDPR Art. 6(1)(f) (legitimate interest in network & information security).

Built to boost your project

Use cases where this plugin delivers the most value.

WooCommerce stores

Stop credit-card stuffing bots before they hit your checkout. Permanent blocklist with CIDR catches entire abusive ASNs in one entry.

News & publishers

High-traffic sites attract scraper armies probing for leaked staging URLs and DB backups. The plugin filters them out without throttling Googlebot.

Agencies managing many sites

Agency-tier license covers 25 sites. Identical configuration replicates per-site; the audit log gives you proof of value at every monthly retainer review.

Membership & LMS sites

Login pages are honeypots for credential stuffing. The plugin protects wp-login.php with the same 404-pattern logic and refuses to ban your paying members.

Headless WordPress / decoupled APIs

Strict scanner detection (sqlmap, nikto, ffuf) without false-positive on legitimate headless tooling. Allow-list your build servers via CIDR and ship.

Sites already running Wordfence / iThemes

Run us as a thin perimeter layer in front of your existing security suite. We catch what their generic rate-limiter misses; they catch what we don't claim to do.

Frequently asked questions

Version history

3.3.2 2026-04-25 Current
  • SDK upgrade to BDW_LM_Client 1.1.0 — singleton replaced by a per-product_slug registry; multiple Baqueiro plugins can now coexist without redeclare-class fatals or config collisions
  • get_instance() detects the calling plugin via debug_backtrace, preserving 100% of legacy call-site behaviour
  • Hardened .distignore against stray *.xml / *.bak / *.log / *.orig artefacts
3.3.1 2026-04-25
  • Fatal-error fix: class_exists guard around BDW_LM_Client to prevent "Cannot redeclare class" when multiple Baqueiro plugins ship the same SDK
  • Defensive bail-out when the SDK is already initialised by another plugin (logged under WP_DEBUG)
3.3.0 2026-04-24
  • Bundled [B] License Manager Client SDK for commercial distribution outside WordPress.org
  • GDPR / LGPD compliance layer: privacy-policy text, personal-data exporter and eraser
  • 52 PHPUnit tests / 67 assertions / 100% passing — CIDR, IP-list parsing, CSV-injection sanitisation
  • 4 bundled locales: en_US, es_ES, pt_BR, gl_ES (POT extracted from 110 source strings)
  • composer.json, phpunit.xml.dist, Makefile, .distignore for repeatable builds
  • Tested up to WordPress 6.7; Network: false declared explicitly
3.2.0 2026-04-20
  • CIDR range support in whitelist and permanent blocklist (IPv4 and IPv6)
  • Log retention with daily WP-Cron task (default 30 days; 0 = keep forever)
  • Firewall now also runs on login_init, blocking banned IPs from brute-forcing wp-login.php
  • Fixed self-relock loop affecting admins after logout
  • Widened url and user_agent columns via dbDelta upgrade path
3.1.1 2026-04-15
  • Admin self-lockout protection: admins are bypassed from the 404 counter
  • Server-side guard refuses to ban the current admin IP without explicit confirm_self=1 flag
  • UX polish on Block manager confirm dialogs and pagination preservation
3.1.0 2026-04-10
  • Block Manager UI (Blocks tab) with one-click unblock, promote-to-permanent and whitelist actions
  • Permanent blocklist option, persisted in plugin settings
  • Active-lock registry for transient enumeration without scanning the entire object cache
3.0.1 2026-04-01
  • Chunked CSV / TXT export with formula-injection protection (=, +, -, @, t, r prefixes)
  • Pagination preservation on unblock and export actions
  • Proxy-header detection warning banner
3.0.0 2026-03-15
  • Full rewrite for WordPress 6.x / PHP 8.1+: namespaced helpers, dbDelta migrations, full PHPDoc, WPCS-compliant
  • Dashboard with totals, last-24h activity and top offending IPs
  • Manual unblock action and accessible admin UI with ARIA labels

Reviews

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System requirements

PHP 8.1+
WP 6.0+

Required plugins

  • None

Known conflicts

  • none

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