Facebook Sharing Debugger returns HTTP 403 Forbidden for public WordPress.com

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  millerpjoseph · Member · Jul 18, 2026 at 11:59 am

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  Hi,

  My public WordPress.com site is returning HTTP 403 Forbidden to Facebook’s Sharing Debugger.

  I’ve confirmed:

  • Site visibility is Public.
  • robots.txt does not block Facebook or other crawlers.
  • Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) are present.
  • OpenGraph.dev successfully scrapes the page.
  • LinkedIn and Apple Messages generate rich previews correctly.
  • Facebook’s Sharing Debugger returns HTTP 403 for both the homepage and all posts.
  • Other public WordPress.com sites (e.g. photomatt.net) return HTTP 200 in the debugger from the same computer/network.

  Has anyone encountered this before, or is there something specific that could cause facebookexternalhit to receive a 403 on an otherwise public WordPress.com site?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  james3265166 · Member · Jul 18, 2026 at 5:40 pm

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  Great job checking all the fundamentals—confirming your robots.txt configuration and Open Graph status rules out the usual culprits. Since other platforms scrape your site perfectly, an HTTP 403 Forbidden specifically hitting facebookexternalhit means Facebook’s crawler requests are being rejected by WordPress.com’s system-level security or firewall layer. This usually happens if Meta’s scraping IP ranges trigger an accidental security block on your specific site container. Because this requires backend access to whitelist or clear the security flag for the crawler, I have tagged this post for Staff / Happiness Engineers so they can check the edge firewall logs for your site and restore Facebook’s access!

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  millerpjoseph · Member · Jul 18, 2026 at 6:43 pm

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  We might be okay! Looks to be working now – I suspect it was simply because the page was so new. Thank you though.