My site is stuck in "pending"

When you click Connect site → on the Add Site form, Manage GPL briefly creates a row in pending status while we make a single HMAC-signed request to your site's connector to confirm the pairing. That request usually finishes in a couple of seconds and the row flips to connected. If it's stuck in pending for more than a minute or two, the request failed part-way and here's how to recover.

The short answer: try again

Most "stuck in pending" cases resolve by just re-submitting the Add Site form. The pending row auto-cleans up after 30 minutes; you don't need to delete it manually. Double-check these before your retry:

• The connector plugin is installed and activated on the WordPress site.
• The URL you entered matches what the connector reports as its home URL — copy it from WP admin → Settings → Manage GPL Connect if in doubt.
• The token you pasted is the current one shown in that same WP admin page. If you regenerated it recently, you need the new value.

The longer answer: what actually failed

Manage GPL's confirmation request can fail for a handful of reasons. When it fails, you normally see a specific error on the Add Site form (not just a pending row), but the most common are:

1. Outbound HTTP to your site is blocked or slow

We call https://yoursite.com/wp-json/managegpl/v1/confirm-pair. If your host blocks inbound HTTPS from us, the request times out. Usually only happens on hardened hosts with strict firewalls. Test from your own machine: curl -I https://yoursite.com/wp-json/ — if that doesn't reach WordPress, Manage GPL can't either.

2. The WordPress REST API is blocked

Security plugins (Wordfence, iThemes Security) and some managed hosts block /wp-json/* for unauthenticated requests. Check https://yoursite.com/wp-json/ in a browser — if you don't see JSON, fix that first. See Common pairing errors.

3. The token on WordPress was changed between copy and paste

If you (or someone else) clicked Regenerate token in the connector's WP admin page after you copied but before you pasted, the token on the platform side is stale. Copy the current token from WP admin and re-submit.

4. The site already has a live pairing with another account

The connector refuses to re-pair if its stored token doesn't match the one you submitted — that's the token-first tenancy model that stops strangers from hijacking your site. The form shows this as a plugin already paired error. To take ownership: go to WP admin → Settings → Manage GPL Connect, click Regenerate token, copy the new value, and re-submit Add Site with it.

Cleaning up a stuck pending row

You don't need to. Pending rows auto-delete after 30 minutes. If yours has been stuck longer than that and it's still there, reach out — we'd like to understand how it slipped through.

Still not working?

Open a support ticket with the site URL, the exact time you tried to pair, and any error message you saw on the Add Site form. We can usually pinpoint the cause from our side-of-the-wire logs.