ShieldPRO 18.5 Upgrade Guide

ShieldPRO 18.5 for WordPress is a major release packed with few changes, improvements and new features.

This guide outlines what have been added/removed, changed, or improved and what fixes we've made.

Firstly, we're going to explain what new features are added, what major changes are made and which options you'd need to review.

New Added Features

For 18.5 release we added

You can now completely lockdown access to your site to prevent any access whatsoever. All traffic will be met with a block page, except for IP addresses present on the bypass/whitelist.

You can access this feature under the Tools section:

Learn more about this feature here.

This is a convenient feature that simplifies the login process for the all users who have Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) by email enabled for their user login. You can use automatic login links alongside 2FA codes.

The setting can be found under the Login Guard module > 2FA:Email section:

Learn more about this feature here.

You can now allow your site users to register Passkeys & FIDO2-compatible devices to complete their WordPress login.

The setting can be found under the Login Guard module > 2FA:Passkeys section:

Learn more about this feature here.

  • Export the entire IP Rules table as CSV

We added the option to export the entire IP Rules table as CSV.

Changes

Change 1: Google reCAPTCHA and hCAPTCHA removed

Captcha is removed from the General Settings > CAPTCHA and Login Protection > Depreciated section.

It has been deprecated for over a year already and have finally been removed from the plugin. Consider using Shield's own Antibot Detection Engine feature.

Change 2: Alert email reports

Alert report emails from scans are now prominently highlighted, making it easy to spot and prioritize critical information that demands immediate attention.

Improvements

For 18.5 release we've made the following improvements

  • We've made some progress forward in improving the Shield interface.
    • Automatically selects the previously active navigation tab when page is reloaded.
    • We updated User Sessions table using our newer UI, with more reliable sessions data and ability to purge sessions in-bulk
    • Security Dashboard - Overview

The dashboard progress meters are automatically updated as settings are changed via Analysis tabs. Further improvements to come.

  • Improved reliability of Antibot Detection Javascript
  • Link-Cheese feature reliability improved
  • All plugin Javascript code has been completely cleaned & rewritten.
  • NotBot JS javascript is more reliable and handles page caching nonce-staleness better.
  • All plugin JS & CSS are optimised, built and packaged using Webpack.

For more information on Shield 18.5 release, read this blog article here.