What is the Login Guard?

The goal of the login guard is to protect against attacks on the WordPress user login process.

It protects you against brute force and bots, while also providing added layers of user identify verification, e.g. multi-factor authentication.

What is multi-factor authentication (MFA)?

See the link below for a complete explanation of MFA.

https://www.icontrolwp.com/blog/security-multi-two-factor-authentication-wordpress/ .

Please read this. It really helps.

Are 3rd party plugins with custom login pages supported?

This is a Pro option and lets Shield interact with 3rd party plugins.

Unless you're a developer it might be hard to realise that the WordPress plugin landscape is a mess.

Everyone does everything differently, and so ensuring Shield works with 3rd party systems is nearly a full-time job in itself.

Systems such as WooCommerce, BuddyPress, etc. all use slightly different login/registration forms and this breaks Shield's Login Guard features since they aren't aligned with WordPress standard API.

If you use these 3rd party plugins, then you will need to go Pro.

Currently support systems are:

WooCommerce - support for login, registration, lost password, and Two-Factor Authentication BuddyPress - support for login, registration, lost password, and Two-Factor Authentication Easy Digital Downloads - support for login, registration, lost password, and Two-Factor Authentication

Login Cooldown - what's that?

Great question! This is perhaps one of the coolest, understated features of the entire plugin.

It elegantly prevents brute force login attacks simply by throttling the WordPress login.

At its default setting, 10, it will restrict valid WordPress logins to 1 every 10 seconds.