How to Block IP by Country: Restrict Access to Your Website from Specific Countries Using .htaccess

Allowing or Blocking Visitors From Specific Countries Using .htaccess

Once launched, a website is available worldwide. However, in many cases, it’s necessary to control your site access, especially when you want to stop spammers and hackers from particular countries.

Fortunately, you can use your WordPress .htaccess file to allow or block visitors from specific countries. Let’s learn how to do so.

Step 1: Generate the Country’s IP Addresses

Plenty of online tools are available to allow or block visitors according to their country. In this tutorial, we’ll be using IP2Location.

• Head to the IP2Location Firewall IP list tool.
• Select the country you want to block or allow.
• Choose between IPv4 and IPv6 in the IP Version menu.
• Choose the format in the Output Format menu. The choice depends on whether you want to block or allow visitors from those countries.
• Click Download.

The interface of IP2Location IP list tool, showing the country, IP version, and output format menus.

• The tool will download the Access Control List (ACL) into your computer.
• If you are using the allow function, make sure to insert the line deny from all above the list of allowed IPs.

Step 2: Insert the Generated IP Addresses into the .htaccess File

Finally, paste the IP addresses of the countries you want to block or allow to .htaccess file. Here’s how to do it using Hostinger’s hPanel:

• Go to Files → File Manager.
• Select your domain and hit Go To File Manager.
• Navigate to the public_html folder and double-click the .htaccess file.
• Open the ACL file on your computer, paste it to your .htaccess file, and hit Save. Your .htaccess file will look like this: An .htaccess file containing an ACL

You can also use an FTP client to edit the .htaccess file.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you’ve learned the easy way to block or allow visitors from specific countries. All you need to do is generate the country’s IP address via IP2Location, then insert an ACL into your .htaccess file.

We hope that this guide was helpful. Let us know in the comments if you have any questions.