Wellllll, have you done any troubleshooting by running with and without Wordfence? That could quickly clear up the question of whether the problem is caused by Wordfence or not. (For that matter, be sure to test with _all_ plugins disabled.) Beyond that, I’d also try the same type of test by changing to the generic WordPress 2016 theme. If neither of those things give any clarity, then next steps would indeed be a glance at your .htaccess file along with talking to your hosting company.
If the problem is indeed Wordfence, then the support folks here have some good methods of evaluating.
MTN
Ron
(@donniepeters)
I am having real problems accessing my WordPress login and called my Host who advised they had no issues loading the site. But when I attempt to access the login page it fails to load for a very long time (10 miniutes+).
I DID disable Wordfence and had no problems at all !! When I went to enable Wordfence it stalled again and I can not access the site at all from any browser !!
There is something in WORDFENCE that is really causing issues!!!!
(And as a side note… I get the same thing on different computers and different Internet providers!!)
Ron
(@donniepeters)
As a followup… I have had to disable the Wordfence Plugin in the database as it prevents me from accessing my WordPress Admin area. With it Disabled… no problems. Enabled….. it is SLOW or does not load at all !
I can’t even get to the Wordfence Options page with it enabled!
Ron
(@donniepeters)
So… I have 4 sites all on the same version of WordPress and Wordfence and it was only the one that was having issues.
I did the following…
Enabled Wordfence again and went to Scan and noted that it was stuck on a scan from 30 hours ago.
Killed the Scan
This allowed the site to function enough I could Export the settings to a Token.
I Disabled Config Caching
Started a new Scan and it got stuck again. This resulted in the WordPress parts of the site becoming non-responsive again.
Disabled Wordfence in the database.
Then went back into WordPress and deleted the Wordfence plugin. It did NOT complete successfully due to a failure to delete /wordfence/wordfence.php
Installed Wordfence Assistant and used ALL available functions to clear all data.
Reinstalled Wordfence.
Ran a Scan and it got stuck again and the WordPress parts of the site became non-responsive…again
Disabled Wordfence AGAIN in the database.
In WordPress Assistant used all available functions to remove everything.
Deleted Wordfence Plugin again. Again it reported an error for the same file.
Went in to FTP and noted that a file in /wp-content/plugins/wordfence/tmp was remaining so I deleted it.
And deleted the wfcache and wflogs directories that were still there.
Reinstalled Wordfence AGAIN!
Imported settings from Token.
Ran Scan successfully to completion.
Ran another scan to completion.
Site now fully functional and responsive in all areas. (And thank goodness for the token import I had everything back again)
So…MY assumption is that ALL WordPress parts of the site become very slow or non-responsive when a SCAN is Stuck !! That’s my best guess! I have seen stuck scans before but they have never caused the site to become non-responsive.
Good you figured it out! The Wordfence scan is problematic. I run it once a week at night on weekends, with most options unchecked. It is quite powerful and resource intensive, not trivial, run with care. MTN
Hi donniepeters,
sorry you were having such trouble with your site. Even if a scan is not able to complete it should not normally affect your system in that way. Perhaps there was a corrupt file lingering in your system or something along those lines.
Ron
(@donniepeters)
Hi wfasa, it was very unusual. I have several sites I manage and all have the same version of WordPress and Wordfence and only one site was giving me problems. When you say “corrupt file” are you meaning in the Wordfence plugin?
WordPress was installed some time back and we had no issues until last week. And the Wordfence updates are done automatically within 24 hours. I am still having some latency issues loading the “Live Traffic” at times.
Hello again,
well no file systems are 100% perfect. Sometimes a file will fail to upload fully or a database table can be corrupt. This happens to our home computers too, right? Sometimes they just break a bit! This is why rinsing and starting from scratch can sometimes be the quickest way to repair.
Live Traffic can be slow to load if you have a high amount of traffic on your site or if your site is running out of memory. Have you tried running the memory test on the Wordfence Diagnostics page? Also, look over the Diagnostics page in full and make sure all checkboxes are green and that there are no warnings on the list that displays your database tables.
My WF scans took hours and never completed. I found an article that provided great advice in terms of how to resolve this problem: everything worked again once I “deleted WF tables and data on deactivation”.
Here is the article:
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This reply was modified 7 years ago by
Andrew Nevins. Reason: Suspicious link
Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
@tamea, Welcome to the forums. Please create a new thread to discuss this. In future should you have a problem it’s always best to create a new thread, even if it looks like you have the same issue as someone else.
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordfence/#new-post
