by
EncodeDotHost
5 (1 reviews)
EDH Bad Bots
A smart WordPress plugin that automatically blocks malicious bots and crawlers that ignore your site's robots.txt file.
EDH Bad Bots ranks #21,471 among WordPress.org plugins with 40+ active installations, a 5/5 rating from 1 reviews, and was last updated Jun 11, 2026. Data from WordPress.org, refreshed twice daily — see methodology.
Tested up to WP 7.0.5 (Current: 7.1.1)
v1.7.4
Current Version v1.7.4
Updated 3 months ago
Last Update on 11 Jun, 2026
Refreshed 9 hours ago
Last Refreshed on
Top 50% by installs
Rank
#21,471
-9 this week
Active Installs
40+
-4.8%
KW Avg Position
31
0.5 better
Downloads
1.2K
+3 today
Support Resolved
0%
—
No change
Rating
100%
Review 5 out of 5
5
(1 reviews)
Next Milestone 50
40+
50+
484
Ranks to Climb
-
Growth Needed
8,000,000
Active Installs
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#21,471
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5.0
1 reviews
Overall
100%
5
1
(100%)
4
0
(0%)
3
0
(0%)
2
0
(0%)
1
0
(0%)
Support Threads Overview
Resolved
Unresolved
1
Total Threads
0
Resolved
1
Unresolved
0%
Resolution Rate
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- Version
- 1.7.4
- Last Updated
- Jun 11, 2026
- Requires WP
- 6.2+
- Tested Up To
- 7.0.5
- PHP Version
- 7.4 or higher
- Author
- EncodeDotHost
Support & Rating
- Rating
- ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5
- Reviews
- 1
- Support Threads
- 1
- Resolved
- 0%
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Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about EDH Bad Bots
Extremely unlikely. In normal operation, legitimate crawlers like Googlebot respect the Disallow rule in robots.txt and never reach the trap URL. As a second layer of protection, if a crawler with a recognised User-Agent (Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.) does hit the trap — for example because of a misconfigured robots.txt — the plugin runs Forward-Confirmed Reverse DNS (FCrDNS) synchronously before making any block decision. If the IP is verified as a genuine crawler, it is whitelisted on the spot and the request is allowed through. Bots that merely spoof a crawler User-Agent but fail FCrDNS are still blocked normally.
The plugin runs a daily cron job (edhbb_check_robots_txt_cron) that reads your site's robots.txt and checks for the trap URL Disallow rule. If the rule is missing, an admin notice is displayed in your WordPress dashboard until the file is corrected. Even without the Disallow rule, the synchronous FCrDNS guard (see above) prevents verified legitimate crawlers from being blocked if they happen to reach the trap URL.
Yes. The User-Agent tokens used to trigger the synchronous FCrDNS pre-check are controlled by the edhbb_trusted_crawler_ua_patterns filter. By default the list covers googlebot, bingbot, slurp (Yahoo), duckduckbot, baiduspider, and yandexbot. You can extend it in your theme's functions.php or a mu-plugin: `php add_filter( 'edhbb_trusted_crawler_ua_patterns', function( $patterns ) { $patterns[] = 'applebot'; $patterns[] = 'petalbot'; return $patterns; } ); ` The hostname suffixes used in the FCrDNS verification step are similarly extensible via the edhbb_trusted_crawler_domains filter.
Bots are blocked for a configurable duration (default 30 days) that you can adjust in the Options tab. You can manually unblock them earlier if needed.
Yes! Add your IP address to the whitelist in the admin panel to ensure you're never blocked.
.htaccess blocking (default) blocks bots at the server level before WordPress loads, making it faster and more effective. PHP blocking works during WordPress initialization and is compatible with Nginx servers.
The plugin performs PTR record lookups to identify the hostname/organization behind blocked IP addresses. This helps you understand what types of bots are being blocked (e.g., "crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com" vs unknown IPs) for better analysis and decision-making.
The plugin uses secure HTTPS-encrypted DNS queries via providers like Cloudflare and Google DNS for enhanced privacy and reliability when resolving hostnames. It automatically falls back to traditional DNS methods if DoH is unavailable.
The plugin is designed for minimal performance impact. Server-level .htaccess blocking actually improves performance by stopping blocked requests before they reach PHP. DNS lookups are cached and processed in the background to avoid delays.
Yes! Server-level .htaccess blocking bypasses caching entirely, ensuring blocked bots are stopped immediately. PHP-level blocking may be affected by some caching configurations. To ensure the bot trap works correctly, you should exclude the unique trap URL from your caching plugin. You can find this URL in the "Help" tab of the plugin's settings.