How do IP proxies work with a WordPress website?

Your typical WordPress site

Your typical WordPress site would normally run on either Apache or Nginx server. It doesn't matter if you use shared, VPS or cloud hosting. The tech powering your WordPress site will always be almost identical.

HTTP Proxy

When your visitors hit your site, they do it either directly or relay through a web proxy service. There are a lot of them out there but one very well known is CloudFlare. Here's how it works.

You use a browser to open up a website and you are either hitting the site directly or relaying through a proxy that routes all traffic to that website.

If the proxy is not configured correctly, the web server will see all traffic coming from the same IP address. This is why sometimes our plugin might block that IP address and all visitors will get blocked. The following diagram is somewhat technical by explains how a misconfigured server might misinterpret visitor's IP address:

Our Limit Login Attempts Reloaded is intelligent enough to determine if your web server is not properly configured to work with a proxy server. You should notify your web hosting provider as soon as possible so that they could fix that issue.

About the Author

Greg Fisher

Greg Fisher is the CMO and co-founder of Limit Login Attempts Reloaded, spearheading the company’s content and user acquisition.