Understanding Visitor IP Address Detection

Identifying visitors and distinguishing them from each other is core to any security service. Shield uses the visitor IP address to identify visitors.

It is critical that the plugin can detect the visitor IP address accurately and so the option to select the visitor IP address source is perhaps one of the most important configuration options.

Unfortunately, visitor IP address detection can be unreliable for many web hosts. Every webhost differs at least a little in their configuration, and sometimes they're not configured as well as they should be.

To help with this, we provide a simple way for you to direct Shield on where to find the correct visitor IP address. Shield will try to do all of this automatically, but where this fails, we'll need your help.

This option is accessible from within the main navigation menu > Dashboard section > click to edit general plugin settings (gear icon) > Plugin Defaults > IP Source. (see the screenshot below)

IP Source setting

There are a list of technical looking IP address sources. We will need you to pick the one that is correct.

If you don't know what your particular IP address is, please see here: 

https://getshieldsecurity.com/my-ip/

Use the IP address printed on that page to select the source from the dropdown that is giving the same IP.

This will help ensure Shield is using the correct source for visitor IP addresses.

You can also use an option for checking visitor IP source (under the Debug Info Page) and Shield will detect visitor IP addresses more accurately, for your particular web hosting.

Debug Info page

Note: If you can't change the IP source, please read the article here.