How to block a country in the firewall

For security, compliance, or operational reasons, you may wish to block visitors from certain countries from accessing your WordPress site. With Staq Firewall, blocking access by country is quick and easy using geo IP rules.

Step-by-Step: Blocking Countries via Staq Firewall

1. Log in to the WordPress site hosted on Staq.
2. In the left menu, click Staq Hosting.
3. Click Firewall.
4. Click the Ban Rules tab.
5. Click Create New Rule.

Select Country Blocking Rule Type

1. Under Rule Type, select Country Blocking.
2. Choose the countries you want to block.

Choose a Blocking Condition

If you want to block the countries you selected, choose:

• Ban IP addresses from the selected countries (inclusion)

If instead you want to block all countries except a few selected ones, e.g., only allow traffic from Australia, then select Australia from the Countries list and then choose the condition as:

• Ban IP addresses from the unselected countries (exclusion)

Exemption Check

Enabling this setting allows safe, verified bots (like Googlebot, Bing, Meta, OpenAI, etc.) to bypass your country block — even if their IP address comes from a restricted country:

Script Blocking Mode

If set to Yes, banned users will be silently blocked at the Nginx level without seeing an error or CAPTCHA. This reduces server load, but may lead to false positives.

If set to No, blocked users will see a reCAPTCHA page and can request access by verifying themselves — a safer option if you’re unsure.

Final Step

Once you’re done configuring the rule, click Save Rule to activate it.