Custom HTML Widget fails to save if ‘href’ inside

My site in development has some odd permission issues. chmod and chown all look great and able to upload images and make other saves. One particular issue that I can narrow down is the custom HTML widget saves great until the moment you add href inside an anchor.
I have a GIF here showing how Save works well and fast until the moment I place href=”” inside – then it freezes with spinning and it does not save. Looking at the logs, I do see a 403 returned on the admin-ajax.php . I see 403 returned in other scenarios such as post.php, but not all of the time. With the Custom HTML widget being so specific, what actions happen on save?

###.###.###.### - - [16/Jul/2021:18:17:48 -0500] "POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.0" 200 47
###.###.###.### - - [16/Jul/2021:18:17:50 -0500] "POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.0" 403 232
###.###.###.### - - [16/Jul/2021:18:17:51 -0500] "POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.0" 200 98
###.###.###.### - - [16/Jul/2021:18:18:01 -0500] "POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.0" 200 47

• This topic was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Developing with WordPress topic

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