As of April 2026, Spider Blocker is a WordPress seo plugin with 20K+ active installations and a 4/5 rating from 5 reviews. It has been downloaded 612K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 4.0+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2015. Last updated 1 year ago — may have compatibility concerns. Downloads are down 19% this week. Top alternative: Yoast SEO – Advanced SEO with real-time….
Spider Blocker blocks most common bots that consume bandwidth and slow down your blog.
It accomplishes this by using .htaccess file to minimize impact on your website. It’s hidden from external scanners.
Spider Blocker is specifically designed for Apache servers with mod_rewrite enabled, allowing you to effortlessly safeguard your website from the most prevalent bots that hamper performance and drain resources.
Apparently you need to keep your htaccess readable all the time or the plugin turns off.
I cannot find any info if the htaccess still needs the plugin to function after this.
This does not make me feel safe at all
Does what it promises to do. No more bad bots to my WP blog 🙂
I like that you can add additional bots. It does what it says and keeps the worst offenders of your page out of the box
It also didn’t crash my multi site or disable admin or anything (like “Stop bad bots”)
This plugin doesn’t work on any of my installations out of the box.
You need to change
$_ENV["SERVER_SOFTWARE"]
to
$_SERVER["SERVER_SOFTWARE"]
Maybe this should be adjusted ?
Once changed it does its job though!
This plugin does exactly what you think it does if this is the type of plugin you are already looking for. It is very simple and effective.
| WordPress | 4.0+ requiredTested up to 6.5.8 |
| PHP | false+ required |
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.