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Wordfence – scan stuck or frozen

Coming to this post means that you probably have the WordPress plugin Wordfence installed. That is fantastic! I’ve only been using it for a week as of the typing to this post, but my outlook on the plugin is high appreciation. The reason:

  1. It’s free – as in air
  2. It’s comprehensive – lots of settings, but straight out of the box it works*
  3. It’s got more – albeit at a cost, but hey the premium options look amazing
  4. It fixes issues and reports

Now instead of rambling on about how this plugin works, the reason for this particular post is to help others who like myself would have struggled against a critical issue which in my opinion breaks the plugin immediately – It NEVER finishes a scan, or it very rarely does.

Scouring the Internet showed me these potential fixes:

  1. Log in as Admin (or admin user) -> Click Wordfence -> Click Options -> Scroll to the bottom and input 15 (some say 25) for the time out value
  2. If you know that your host is running Litespeed Server (rather then Apache or Nginx or IIS) then this is what fixed my issue. Using Filezilla locate the .htaccess file in your root directory (cPanel it is /public_html). Then edit the .htaccess file and input …

RewriteRule .* - [E=noabort:1]

just after the line that says…

RewriteRule /

Save and then upload the changed file to your website. Hey presto problem solved.

For the last fix check here – https://support.wordfence.com/support/solutions/articles/1000129050-running-wordfence-under-litespeed-web-server-and-preventing-process-killing-or

*  if you are running Litespeed you MUST change your .htaccess file for it to work.

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