I’d been using the Google AdSense plugin for WordPress ever since launching this site, but recently when I decided to tweak a few settings, any additional changes seemed impossible. When I tried clicking on the “Manage ads” button in AdSense it would sometimes sit for a while at “Analyzing your site” and then say “Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again.” But sometimes, it would make it past analyzing the site, but then would generate this error whenever I tried to save any changes: “Sorry we were unable to save your configuration. The request to your server failed with error code 500.” After some trial & error, I figured out what the problem was…
Actually, there were two problems. The first, and more minor issue, was I was running the NoScript add-on in my web browser, and it mistakenly took the AdSense interface for a clickjacking attempt. So the first thing to do when editing AdSense settings is disable all of your browser extensions (just to be safe).
With that out of the way, the next thing to do is deactivate the Wordfence Security plugin. With that fully disabled I could finally use the AdSense plugin as normal. Apparently something this plugin does interferes with AdSense’s ability to work properly. When done with AdSense, just re-enable Wordfence.
The funny thing is, I have a number of other security plugins installed as well, along with some caching plugins, all of which seemed like they could’ve also caused the problem, but none of them made any difference. It’s only disabling the Wordfence plugin that allows AdSense to work again on my site – even with all the other security stuff still enabled. Go figure…