• We received the following message after installing Wordfence:

    Scan Stage Failed. A scan stage has failed to start. This is often because the site either cannot make outbound requests or is blocked from connecting to itself.

    We followed the instructions here with no luck: https://www.wordfence.com/help/scan/troubleshooting/#if-your-scans-arent-starting

    We turned on debug logging and also saw this under Connectivity:
    wp_remote_post() test back to this server failed! Response was:
    202 Accepted This additional info may help you diagnose the issue. The response headers we received were:

    HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
    Server: nginx
    Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:47:06 GMT
    Content-Type: text/html
    Content-Length: 224
    Connection: close
    SG-Captcha: challenge
    X-Robots-Tag: noindex
    Set-Cookie: nevercache-b39818=Y;Max-Age=-1
    Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT
    Cache-Control: no-store,no-cache,max-age=0
    X-SG-CDN: 1
    X-CE: us-east4-t65t
    X-Proxy-Cache-Info: DT:1
    Host-Header: 8441280b0c35cbc1147f8ba998a563a7

    <html><head><link rel=”icon” href=”data:;”><meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;/.well-known/sgcaptcha/?r=%2Fwp-admin%2Fadmin-ajax.php%3Faction%3Dwordfence_testAjax&y=powf:35.212.28.116:1787856426.022″></meta></head></html>

    Is there something else we can do?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • Plugin Support wfmargaret

    (@wfmargaret)

    Hi @jcollier,

    Thanks for the detailed output. That was really helpful.

    The response headers show SiteGround’s bot challenge intercepting the request (SG-Captcha: challenge), with the body redirecting to /.well-known/sgcaptcha/. So your site’s request to itself gets a CAPTCHA page instead of reaching admin-ajax.php, which causes a failed loopback. Ask SiteGround to exclude the server IP from the SG-Captcha challenge, then recheck Connectivity and the scans.

    You can also try “Start all scans remotely” under Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics in the Debugging Options at the bottom, though if SG-Captcha is challenging everyone, our servers will likely run into the same issue.

    Let me know how it goes,
    Margaret

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