We say this every time we release a new version of ShieldPRO, but this is definitely our most exciting release of Shield for WordPress, ever.

We’re introducing serious features to combat the non-stop bot-thrashing of our WordPress sites. No other WordPress security plugin has taken this problem seriously to-date, and we intend to do all that we can to stop them.

As always, we highly recommend you review the implementation details for this release in the Shield 11.0 Upgrade Guide.

Let’s dive into the new features with ShieldPRO v11.

#1 WordPress AntiBot Detection Engine (ADE)

We go into full details here about what this is and how it works. But here’s a brief overview:

To hack 30,000+ websites every day, WordPress site hacking needs to be automated. And that’s where bots come in.

Bots are constantly hammering our sites. Either probing for vulnerabilities, sending login requests, or whatever else they need to do to get a foot-hold on our WordPress sites.

If we can detect bad bots, we can stop them. The challenge comes in being able to detect them with accuracy, as they use many different ways to mask their appearance.

ShieldPRO 11 comes with our exclusive, not-seen-anywhere-else, AntiBot Detection Engine (ADE).

Its sole purpose is to detect bad bots and then allow Shield to block them when they make requests such as user login or user registration.

Detecting bad bots makes your WordPress sites more secure and lets you remove CAPTCHAs and other form protections that ruin the Visitor Experience.

#2 Remove CAPTCHAS and Checkboxes (Finally!)

With Shield’s AntiBot Detection Engine, we can now remove hCAPTCHA, Google reCAPTCHA and Shield’s “I’m a human” checkbox from our login and user registration forms.

You can do the same for WP comment forms too.

With ShieldPRO v11 we don’t remove them by-default, but offer the option to replace them with our ADE. We’ll remove them at a later date.

#3 Block Contact Form SPAM (Finally!)

One of our most requested features was to add our anti-spam system to Contact Form 7, and other form plugins.

But the technical challenge involved there was always greater than we liked due to the ever-changing nature of these plugins.

With ADE letting us remove frontend user additions such a CAPTCHAs, integrating with these contact forms is much more practical.

With this release, ShieldPRO intregrates with 9 of the top WordPress Contact Forms to block SPAM submissions:

  1. Contact Form 7
  2. Elementor PRO
  3. Fluent Forms
  4. Formidable Forms
  5. Forminator
  6. Gravity Forms
  7. Kali Forms
  8. Ninja Forms
  9. WPForms

If your form isn’t listed here let us know and we’ll look at integrating.

Whether we can or can’t integrate a form provider depends very much on their implementation.

#4 CSV Download/Export of Databases

We’ve been asked for this a number of times, but we had a few database improvements we needed to make before this was going to be straight forward to do.

With this release of Shield Security for WordPress, you can download:

  • All Traffic data as CSV
  • All Audit Trail data as CSV
  • All IP data as CSV

We’ll likely offer filters and other download formats in the future, but in order to get this functionality into the plugin, we’ve kept it simple and straightforward for now.

#5 Return of Stats Charts and Custom Charts

In an earlier version of Shield, we had a few simple charts available to illustrate how effective Shield was on the site.

We’re bringing these back, along with a custom chart option so you can see the stats of all Shield events and actions taken on your site.

Screenshot illustrating the new charts and stats screen

#6 Major Code Cleaning and Enhancements

Since our move to PHP 7.0, we’ve been aggressive in our code cleaning, enhancements, and moving our codebase to Strict PHP Standards.

This allows us to catch potential bugs far earlier in the development process before they would ever reach a live site.

Some enhancements we’ve made:

Comments, Suggestions and Questions

There are many reasons to be excited about this new ShieldPRO release. and we can’t wait to get it into your hands.

There will certainly be some confusion and question over this new feature, so please do feel free to drop us a comment below and we’ll update the article wherever necessary to clarify any issues.

Thank you as always for your support!