Wordfence brakes complete site design

Have you verified that the firewall is in “learning mode”? If you immediately set it to active it doesn’t “know” your site yet and may well block needed features.

Also – it sounds like you may be using something like Autoptimize, or a caching plugin which manipulates CSS/JS… be sure to purge any caching and so forth.

Hi @snake-plissken, thanks for reaching out to us!

It does on the face of it sound like Learning Mode would need to be enabled with an issue such as this, but of course if you ARE running it in Learning Mode as it’s a new installation then maybe not.

If it’s a local or staging site that can’t make or accept connections, there may be loading problems in the background that are stopping subsequent Javascript, which may in turn be preventing styling/modifying CSS from loading in properly. Do you have errors in your browser console? Also what does the connectivity and permissions situation look like on your Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics page? Do you have any highlighted errors when you expand the sections?

Thanks,

Peter.

Hey,

sorry for the delayed response. too busy lately to work on the site. I think i have figured it out. I was using the maintenance mode of my theme and when I activate the firewall with that active, it goes haywire. If I disable maintenance mode, enable firewall and then reactivate maintenance mode, it seems to work. SO far.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time lately to work on that project. I will have to update in the next few days/weeks if the error or issue comes back. Especially with maintenance mode disabled.

Hi @snake-plissken,

No worries, thank-you for checking in and providing an update. In many cases with staging/development sites, issues around inbound/outbound connectivity are common which is why I mentioned checking the Diagnostics page for signs of this. I’m replying here now which will keep the topic active for 7 more days. If a topic is inactive for ~7 days it’s likely to be closed, but feel free to open another if that’s the case here and you still some require assistance in the coming weeks.

Thanks,

Peter.