If you’re unable to activate your license key on your website then there could be a few reasons why:

1. The license key you’re trying to activate is invalid

Make sure you’re not accidentally trying to activate your purchase key or invoice key. Your License key is listed within your Account and also emailed to you when you first purchase the plugin.

2. You’ve exceeded the number of sites that your license can be activated on

If you have a Personal (1 site) license then check to make sure it isn’t already activated on another domain, such as a staging or test/development site. If you have a Business (5 site) license then it’s possible that you have already activated the license on 5 other domains. You can check the sites that a license is activated on in your Account.

Development / staging sites
For development purposes, you can activate a license key on a development/staging site without it using up a “site” on your license. This allows you to have the license key activated on both a development site and a live site. The license can be activated on the following development URLs in addition to your live site:

localhost
10.0.0.0/8
172.16.0.0/12
192.168.0.0/16
*.dev
.*local
dev.*
staging.*

3. iThemes Security plugin

The iThemes Security plugin is known to have a setting that can cause this issue. The setting is called “Filter Suspicious Query Strings in the URL”

To resolve the issue, simply disable the “Filter Suspicious Query Strings in the URL” setting. If you’re not using iThemes Security, it will be named something different, though similar.

4. Coming Soon / Maintenance Mode plugin

If you are using a coming soon or maintenance mode plugin, it’s likely that license keys will not be able to be activated, since the coming soon / maintenance mode plugin will block the requests. To resolve the issue, simply deactivate the maintenance mode or coming soon plugin. If you need to leave it active, deactivate it temporarily to test the license key activation process and then reactivate the plugin.

5. Something else may be blocking your website from connecting to ours to verify your license

If you’re still unable to activate your license key on your site then it’s likely that something on your site/server is blocking the connection from your site to ours. 99.9% of our customers are able to activate their licenses without a problem, but for a select few people there seems to be a problem activating, usually due to a security setting on their server.

You are usually able to solve the problem by having their hosts add our website IP address to their outgoing firewall. Your host may have an IP defined outgoing firewall in place on their server and so adding our site to it will then hopefully allow you to activate your license key successfully. Try asking your web host to add our site to their outgoing firewall:

Website URL: https://smashballoon.com
IP address: 198.62.109.199
Exact activation URLS:
https://smashballoon.com/?edd_action=get_version
https://smashballoon.com/?edd_action=activate_license
https://smashballoon.com/?edd_action=deactivate_license
https://smashballoon.com/?edd_action=check_license

 

Please note, you can also update the plugin manually by following the directions in these links:
Manually updating the Custom Facebook Feed plugin
Manually updating the Instagram Feed plugin