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Country Geofencing

Block high-risk geographic regions or mark trusted countries with simple country rules

Many online businesses operate exclusively in specific countries. For example, a local medical clinic, a country-specific legal practice, or an e-commerce shop that only ships within North America may have zero legitimate business in regions on the other side of the world. At the same time, a significant percentage of automated hacking and card testing attacks originate from specific high-risk territories. Country Geofencing lets you set geographic boundaries in seconds.

Country Geofencing screen showing ISO-2 country selection, regional ALLOW and DENY rules, and the Active Geofence Policies table
Govern traffic by geographic origin with edge Geo-IP evaluation on the Geofencing tab.

Understanding Allow vs Deny country rules#

  • DENY (Geoblock): Visitors from the selected country are blocked from viewing your website. When a visitor from a denied country arrives, WebOptiva shows an HTTP 403 Forbidden screen reading Request blocked by country policy. All other countries browse normally.
  • ALLOW (Explicit Whitelist): Marks the selected country as trusted. Visitors from that country skip Bot Governance and rate-limit checks, which is useful for countries where your customers or partners are frequently throttled. It does not block other countries.

Step-by-step: how to create a country rule#

  1. In Security operations, click the Geofencing tab in the sub-navigation bar.
  2. Select your website domain name from the dropdown at the top.
  3. In the Add Country Geofencing Rule card, choose a Target Country from the searchable dropdown (e.g. United States, United Kingdom, Germany).
  4. Choose the Action: DENY (Geoblock with 403) to restrict access, or ALLOW (Explicit Whitelist) to trust the country.
  5. Choose the Target Scope: Workspace-Wide (Applies to all domains) or a single domain hostname.
  6. Click Stage Geofence Rule. The rule appears in the Active Geofence Policies table below.
  7. Review your staged countries, then click Save Draft and Deploy changes to activate geographic screening globally.

Bonus: localized shopping for real customers#

When a legitimate visitor is allowed through, WebOptiva forwards their country code to your hosting server in an x-weboptiva-country header. Your web store can use this to automatically display local currencies, regional shipping options, or translated languages without doing slow lookups.

Expected result#

Precise geographic control over who visits your website, reducing spam and payment fraud while keeping your primary customer markets completely unobstructed.

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