Note: This lockout is different from a blog lockout, where you are unable to sign in to your WordPress account. If that has happened to you, try this out instead.
Why Did This Happen?
If you are noticing that users are being blocked from your site, they are most likely being blocked due to broken links being present on your site.
With upgraded security measures in place on the Basic Starter Blog subscription, this can cause users to be flagged temporarily when viewing sites that have broken links. The block will last about 5 minutes until it is resolved, as this is an attempt to keep spam bots off your site. If the user checks again and broken links are there, they may be blocked again.
If you have been blocked from your own live site, click here to find your IP, and then send a message to our support team asking for this IP address to be unblocked. If you are aware of any other users who are blocked from viewing your site, send their IPs to our support team as well! While the team works on that, follow the rest of this article to learn how to prevent this and other site lockouts in the future.
How to Prevent This
To fix this issue going forward, it is good to track down any broken links that might be present on your site that would cause this.
There are many tools out there that can achieve a crawl like this, but the one that will be demonstrated here is:
First, enter your domain into the search box and click Check Site.
The crawler will start scanning your site for all links present and will start building a list of issues found. Issues related to a lockout will most likely be: 403, 404, or Host Not Found errors present. In the left panel under Issue Types, Click each of these to find out where issues exist on your site.
The screen will show you a list of the links with the error. The most important thing to check for each is the given URL (that will be the link that isn't working), and then Linked from link.
Example:
This will tell me that I have a broken link somewhere on the main site home page, as well as 4 additional pages. Knowing this leads me to believe that there is a site canvas somewhere on my homepage, as well as probably added on to other pages, leading out to a broken link. An easy way to check, I'll head to my homepage and check the links of all the elements on the site canvases.
Sure enough, I see that in my Footer site canvas, there is a URL click action going out to that site noted in Dr. Link Check.
This will give me the idea that I didn't place https:// in front of my URL link, so it isn't going to go to the right place when functioning as a URL click action. All URL click actions must have https:// in front, or they will be treated as pages of the site link Dr. Link Check showed me.
After fixing that link, if I rerun the checker that error should no longer show up, and I am closer to resolving any broken links on the site.
More Info
Common broken links include renaming pages and forgetting to update click actions, URL click actions not having https:// in front, and embed codes throwing errors from their source code. This type of error will most likely need to be resolved through the embed code provider.