Full Answer

WordPress security plugins protect sites from malicious traffic, but their protection mechanisms can inadvertently disrupt legitimate tracking infrastructure in several ways.

Firewall rule interference is the most common issue. WAF rules that block requests to unfamiliar external domains may intercept outbound API calls to tracking endpoints — Google's conversion API, Meta's graph API, or a server-side pipeline's ingestion URL. The security plugin sees an outbound POST request carrying user data to a third-party domain and flags it based on pattern matching. The tracking event never reaches its destination, but no error surfaces in the store's frontend or WooCommerce admin.

Rate limiting creates intermittent failures. Security plugins that throttle requests per IP address or per time window may interfere with batch event transmission. A server-side pipeline sending batched events to a tracking endpoint may trigger rate limits designed to prevent brute-force attacks, causing some batches to be dropped while others succeed. The result is randomly incomplete conversion data that is nearly impossible to diagnose without inspecting the security plugin's access logs.

Bot detection is a subtler issue. Tracking servers and API endpoints that make callbacks to the WordPress site — such as Meta's CAPI verification requests or Google's Enhanced Conversion validation — may be classified as bot traffic and blocked. The security plugin correctly identifies the request as non-human but incorrectly categorises it as malicious.

The diagnostic approach is to temporarily set the security plugin to learning mode or monitoring-only mode and compare conversion data volumes before and after. If conversion counts increase during the monitoring period, the security plugin's active rules are likely blocking tracking requests. Whitelisting the specific tracking endpoints and their IP ranges resolves the issue without reducing overall security coverage.