Activation is a state your site keeps confirming, not a flag written once and forgotten. That is why a license can lapse without you doing anything: one of the conditions it rested on changed.
This page is about how that behaves on a live site. What you bought and how many domains it covers is a separate question.
#How the check happens
Your site compares its license against our server in the background, once a day. It is a scheduled WordPress event with its own interval, defaulting to 86400 seconds. An interval shorter than an hour is treated as a misconfiguration and quietly reset to daily.
The event only exists on sites that have a license. If it disappears from the schedule for any reason, the site puts it back on its own, with no notice and nothing for you to do.
Each check confirms three things: that the license exists and is valid, that it sits on this domain, and that your support period is still running.
The check runs on the WordPress scheduler, so a site with WP-Cron disabled may see it delayed.
The scheduler's state is visible on the theme's system information screen, which is the first place to look when a status seems frozen.
The server's answer is cryptographically signed and your site verifies that signature. The practical meaning is simple: license state cannot be forged by editing the database. The signature covers the fields access actually depends on, including the purchase code, the domain, the status, whether support is current and until when, the length of the grace window, and the server clock.
#The six states
You will see one of these words in the panel:
- Active
Everything is in order.
- Inactive
No activation on this domain.
- Grace period
We could not be reached, and your site is running normally while it retries. Explained below.
- Expired
The grace period ran out without contact being restored.
- Blocked
The license was blocked, usually after a refund or a terms violation.
- Unverified
A normal intermediate state right after activation, before the first successful check. Not an error.
#The grace period
If our server is temporarily unreachable, your site does not switch the Pro features off. This is the part worth knowing, because it is the difference between a network blip and a panicked evening.
Instead the site enters a grace period, keeps working exactly as before, and retries. The deadline comes from the signed response, the server time plus the number of days it granted, so it cannot be extended by editing the database. When there is no signed response to anchor to, a local fallback of three days applies.
The timer starts once. Every further failed attempt continues that same window rather than opening a new one, so a week long outage cannot become an endless grace period.
If contact is restored within the window, everything returns to normal by itself and the timer resets. Nothing needs to be clicked. If it is not restored, the Pro layer closes until the next successful check.
The end of the grace period is applied the first time the license state is read, rather than waiting for the scheduler to fire. That means a site with WP-Cron disabled does not sit in grace forever.
A short outage on our side cannot break your site.
Planned maintenance, a network blip or a temporary firewall rule all land in the grace period, and there is nothing to reinstall and nothing to reactivate afterwards.
#Why an activation lapses
- The domain changed
The most common reason by far. The check sees a domain that does not match the one the license sits on and drops the activation. This covers moving from staging to live, changing the site address in settings, and gaining or losing
www.- The site was cloned
A copy carries the activation record in its database, pointing at the original domain. Same situation, same fix.
- The license was released elsewhere
Removed from your account or from another site. This one does not take effect instantly; it lands on the next check.
- The support period ended
Not an error and not a block. The theme keeps working and the licence stays valid, and what closes is the support channel.
- A refund was issued
The license stops being valid, and the check reflects that.
In every domain related case the fix is the same: move the activation to the domain the site actually runs on.
#Repeated activation attempts
Activation requests are rate limited. Clicking activate and deactivate several times in a row produces an error about the number of requests. It is not a block on your license and it clears by itself in a short time.
Systematic cycles of activation and deactivation, or attempts to hold one license on several domains at once, go to a manual review, and a license can be restricted as a result of one.
If you need more domains, that is what the larger plans are for, including options with no domain limit. It is cheaper and considerably less trouble than any workaround.
#What a check sends
The purchase code, the domain, and the item identifier. Nothing about your content, your visitors or your database.
#Common questions
Can I turn the check off?
No, and there would be nothing to gain from it, because the check is what keeps updates and the Pro features available and without it the site has no way to confirm the licence is still yours.
My site is behind a firewall that blocks outgoing traffic
The first check fails, the grace period starts, and the Pro layer closes when that window ends, so allowing outbound HTTPS to our server restores everything on the next check with nothing to reinstall.
The panel says unverified right after activation
That is expected rather than an error, and it becomes active at the first successful check.
Does the site call home on every page load?
No, once a day in the background through the WordPress scheduler, and a visitor never triggers it.
The status looks wrong compared to my account
Reload the admin and clear any object cache first, since a cached option is the usual reason a stale status lingers, and if the two still disagree after that then open a ticket with the domain and the status word you see.
#Still stuck
Open a support ticket with the domain, the status word in the panel, and what your account shows for the same licence.
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