How do I block a website on my Firewall?

If you’re managing a multi user system and you do not want to access users a specific website, this article is for you. Though, there is no direct setting to configure this. But in Windows 10, you can simply use Windows Defender Firewall to block a website.

Table of Contents Show

Block A Website In Windows 10 Using Firewall
Can firewall be used to block websites?
How do I block certain websites on my computer?
How do I selectively block a website?
How do I block certain websites on Windows 10?

All you need is the website IP address. Each website have its own IP address to which its server is pointed. You can get this IP address by pinging the website. Once you got the IP address, you’ve to create an Outbound Rule with Windows Defender Firewall, blocking that IP address and you’re done.

Here are the steps you need to perform.

Block A Website In Windows 10 Using Firewall

We’re illustrating this method by blocking twitter.com. You can apply it to any website.

1. Open Command Prompt. Type ping domain.tld and press enter key. Replace domain.tld with the website address you want to block.

2. Notice the IP address of the website in command execution. We’ll be using this IP address to block the website.

3. Go to Control Panel > Windows Defender Firewall > Advanced Settings.

4. In Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security, right click on Outbound Rules and select New Rule.

5. In New Outbound Rule Wizard window, select Rule type as Custom and hit Next.

6. Then for Program section, select All programs. For Protocol and Ports, select default settings and move on.

7. Under Scope section, select These IP addresses and click Add. Type the IP address we got in step 2 and click OK. Click Next.

8. In the Action section, select Block the connection, hit Next.

9. Finish the rest of section with default and complete the wizard and reboot the system.

After rebooting the system, the website (you wanted to) should be blocked from access.

If you want to unblock the website later, simply delete the outbound rule.

You can also block website using hosts file, check out this video:

That’s it!

Related: Disable Windows Defender Firewall In Windows 10.

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Possibly, depending on which version of Windows you're using, although I don't recall ever seeing any such options.

It's probably easier to just add entries into your C:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/DRIVERS/ETC/HOSTS file (it's a plain ASCII text file that you can edit directly with Windows Notepad), like so:

127.0.0.1 www.bad-web-site.example.com
127.0.0.1 www.another-site.example.net

The IP address "127.0.0.1" is localhost (your local computer), and using it for the web site addresses (the domain names) you wish to block will result in a timeout (assuming you're not running a local web server like Apache HTTPd; if you are, then its web page will appear which will be fine anyway).

Make sure that you block both with and without the "www" portion; this is quite easy as you can specify multiple sites on a single line by delimiting them with spaces, like so:

127.0.0.1 www.bad-web-site.example.com bad-web-site.example.com
127.0.0.1 www.another-site.example.net another-site.example.net

Also note that the domains are added without any protocol, so without http://, https:// or ftp://.

How To Article

Note: In Windows Vista or Windows 7 you must open Notepad.exe as an Administrator to be able to edit and save changes to the hosts file. Right click on notepad.exe or its shortcut and select "run as Administrator" once Notepad is open use File > Open to navigate to the hosts file.

Can firewall be used to block websites?

Firewalls with added DNS-based internet restriction capabilities can block websites as well, but they can only block the entire website – not specific URLs. When a user types in “YouTube.com”, their browser will make a DNS query to get the IP address of the website.