Got 401 after 7 failed login attempt

Try manually resetting your plugins (no Dashboard access required). If that resolves the issue, reactivate each one individually until you find the cause.

If that does not resolve the issue, access your server via SFTP or FTP, or a file manager in your hosting account’s control panel, navigate to /wp-content/themes/ and rename the directory of your currently active theme. This will force the default theme to activate and hopefully rule-out a theme-specific issue (theme functions can interfere like plugins).

If you can install plugins, install Health Check. On the troubleshooting tab, you can click the button to disable all plugins and change the theme for you, while you’re still logged in, without affecting normal visitors to your site.

Thank you t-p. I tried your suggestions and the 401 still occurring.

It looks like to me that you are using something to manage your logins? Is there something installed that is tieing you to facebook login? Find the plugin and you usually can adjust the login attempts. However, the reason you can’t get in after 7 failed attempts is to prevent hackers who might be trying to get into your site.

This is really a good thing. Do you often have more than 7 login attempts that fail?

Hi Kim White. The website does have a Facebook login plugin installed and activated. But I did try to deactivate all the activated plugins to find the cause and that did not resolve the 401 issue at all. So I don’t think it’s the plugins.

The reason why I don’t want the 401 page to show up is because I have received quite a lot of complaints, mostly elder people, that they had difficulty following the correct procedure of registering, setting a login password and logging into the website And they ended up seeing a 401 page that stopped them from login onto the website for like 5 minutes. So I think instead of a 401 page, it’d be good to have a message shown on the login page telling the users to contact me for help.

I also noticed that not just failed login attempts could result in 401. If you keep on refreshing the page or switching between the login, registration and forgot password pages you can get a 401 as well.

Here is another WP website that I worked on before that does not have this issue. https://waterdale.com.au/wp-login.php I am guessing the possible cause could be the web hosting server because they are hosted on different hosting companies.

Anyone got any idea, please?

Yes. your hosting could have the login installed on the server level (or a “must use” plugin, these cannot be deactivated from the admin area)
If you have deactivated all your plugins that would be the way to go.
This is not a normal behavior of a typical WordPress install.