Working everything fine till yesterday and suddenly this “Warning: This page allows direct access to your site settings. You can break things here. Please be cautious!” appeared in the WordPress dashboard? Don’t worry, it could be because of your antivirus or blocking app installed in your computer system.
A few days back I was also facing the same issue. I upgraded one of my websites to WordPress 5.8 and tried to save some setting changes from the dashboard but every time it was taking me to this warning page,
Parallelly, plugins upload/installation and WordPress re-install also was not working. So, I posted this on the WordPress support forum. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive any solution. Then I started to debug it myself and carried out the following test cases
- Tried reinstalling WordPress core…failed
- Manually updated/downgraded WordPress core…failed
- Disabled plugins/themes…failed
- Updated PHP.ini variables to high values…failed
- Tried different browsers…failed
- Tried different device/mobile browser… âś…worked fine here
So, I concluded that the problem is with my computing device. And found a solution in a few minutes.
What caused “Warning: This page allows direct access to your site settings.”?
In my case: Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition was blocking the execution of JavaScript that processes ajax communication that saves and updates the WordPress settings. The antivirus might have blocked suspicious execution of JavaScript. The antivirus scans browser-loaded pages and their content to detect malware. And the latest WordPress scripts may have fitted in antivirus threat definitions.
In your case: There may be other scenarios of ajax communication or JavaScript execution failure. Like, different antivirus, script blockers, adware, etc. Just check what could block your WordPress java scripts and ajax communication.
The solution to ” This page allows direct access to your site settings. You can break things here. Please be cautious!” Warning
In my case, I just disabled Bit Defender Antivirus Free Edition and everything started working normally. I was able to regenerate the same error by enabling antivirus again.
In your case, if you don’t have installed the above antivirus, then check what could be the possible reasons for blocking such as anti-malware, ad blocker, save site plugins, etc.
Disabling antivirus is not a real solution to “Warning: This page allows direct access to your site settings. You can break things here. Please be cautious!” so try to add your web address in the exception list. Or, try an alternative. I hope this issue will be fixed automatically with future updates of both WordPress and antivirus.
