I’m encountering a 403 Forbidden error on my WordPress site when it tries to perform loopback requests, such as verifying page cache or running scheduled tasks.
Plugin used: WP Crontrol by John Blackbourn
Error message: There was a problem spawning a call to the WP-Cron system on your site. This means WP-Cron events on your site may not work. The problem was: Unexpected HTTP response code: 403.
Site information:
Username: if0_39295073
Domain: englishnest.wuaze.com
Website IP: 185.27.134.110
Home Directory: /home/vol9_3/infinityfree.com/if0_39295073
One example event that hasn’t run is: recovery_mode_clean_expired_keys, last scheduled for June 22nd.
Could you please check whether ModSecurity or other firewall settings are blocking loopback/internal requests (such as to 127.0.0.1)?
Thank you so much for your help! — AndreaNest
PS: I’m not a techie, I asked Microsoft Copilot to help write this message. I hope it helps to understand the problem.
Thanks so much, @dan30008 I really appreciate the quick and clear answer—even if it wasn’t the news I was hoping for! At least now I understand the limitation.
WP cron will work just fine on our hosting. You can even trigger it by hand by just navigating to <your site>/wp-cron.php.
The only thing that will not work is having PHP code on your code trigger that wp-cron.php endpoint for you. Those requests will be blocked by this security system: Ensuring only web browsers can access your website
But again, this is not a problem for normal website functionality.
If the WordPress cron job queue is not being processed, that’s usually the result of some plugin adding broken jobs to the queue that are blocking the rest of the queue from being processed, or just adding such a large amount of jobs that WordPress is having trouble keeping up.
You can use a plugin like WP Crontrol to get more insight into the queue, and then try triggering the cron yourself with the wp-cron.php URL to see if you get get things moving.
