I'm locked out of my own site!

Are you the site owner?

If Yes - continue reading.


If No - contact the owner of the site. We are not the owner of the site.  We do not manage the site. Please contact the site owner.

2) FTP or File Manager - what is it?

Please note: When the term FTP is used, if you don't know what this is, you can also use a File Manager program provided by your web hosting provider.  If you don't know what that is, please contact your web host and read this guide here.

3) Now continue if you are the site owner and, you know what FTP/File Manager is

Use of this plugin assumes that you have full administrator rights to this site, and this include FTP access.

FTP is the ultimate administrator access and should anything ever go wrong with your site, FTP is often the only (best) way to fix it.

In this way, if you ever get locked out of your own site as a result of this plugin, for whatever reason, you can forcefully turn off all restrictions made by it.

To do this:

  1. Log into your FTP space for this website - we recommend FileZilla.
  2. Browse to the plugin folder:  ..../wp-content/plugins/wp-simple-firewall/
  3. Create or upload a file called (exactly) :  forceoff

Please note, the file has no extension, such as, for example, .txt, .php, .anything.

Then, reload the site and it will automatically switch off all plugin features.

If for some reason this doesn't work for you, you can simply rename the plugin folder to anything else and WordPress will disable the plugin completely.

Important: Creating "forceoff" file will just temporarily disable processing of any security rules. It doesn't change any settings, it just doesn't enforce them.

Once you create it, please log into your site, change the settings (solve the problem), and then remove the "forceoff" file.

Please note that, if you remove the file before changing settings, the problem will return.

Hint: You can also automatically remove the "forceoff" file from the inside of your WordPress site. Just look for the notification at the top of the Shield admin area and click this link here:

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