Unable to Activate Elementor Pro License in Local: Chronic "Forbidden" & "403 Forbidden" Errors

I recently purchased a yearly license for Elementor Pro. Although I’ve had no trouble activating the license on the “live” version of my website, I’m afraid I’ve had no such luck activating my license within Local by Flywheel. What makes this especially frustrating is that I purchased this license in order to gain access to Elementor’s template library, but without an active license I’m unable to use those templates to develop my site on my Local Machine.

I’ve gone back and forth Elementor’s customer support team and confirmed that I’m using the most up-to-date versions of both Elementor and Elementor Pro. I’ve also shared my Elementor account data with them, as well as error logs from within Elementor’s settings. They’re unable to resolve this issue and have suggested that I reach out to the community here.

In the simplest possible terms, here’s the problem I’m encountering:

When I log into my Local by Flywheel site using my admin credentials, Elementor Pro displays a welcome message at the top of my Dashboard that reads: “Welcome to Elementor Pro! Please activate your license to get feature updates, premium support and unlimited access to the template library.” I’ve presented with two license activation options: “Connect & Activate” which automatically retrieves my license key using my Elementor User ID & PW or “Activate Manually” which allows me to cut & paste my license key directly into WordPress.

When I select “Connect & Activate,” my browser attempts to open http://SITE-NAME.local/wp-admin/admin.php?page=elementor-connect&app=activate&action=authorize&nonce=4af7a7d65c. This generates a page with a light grey background and a center white box in which the word “Forbidden” is displayed. (Note: I substituted the generic “SITE-NAME” here for the actual name of the local site in Local.)

When I select "Activate Manually, my browser attempts to open http://SITE-NAME.local/wp-admin/admin-post.php. This generates a nearly identify page (light grey background, center white box) but, in this case, the text “HTTP Error (503)” is displayed on the screen. Immediately beneath this error is a link reading “<< Back.”

I have to admit this issue has me fairly stumped - but I also have to admit that my back-end / server-side skills are pretty limited.

I’m hoping there’s a simple solution to this problem. Has anyone experienced any similar issues activating their Elementor Pro license? If so, how did you manage to troubleshoot this problem?

Sorry, I don’t have a fix for you here. But, I just wanted to point out that those Pro Templates aren’t as great as they seem. I also purchased Elementor Pro to have access to the templates so I could get a site up quickly for an upcoming seminar, and had no previous experience with Elementor, other than watching lots of youtube videos. After choosing one of the templates, I kept hitting what seemed like a brick wall when trying to tweak things here and there. It was like the template elements were somehow locked and couldn’t be changed. The most prominent example was the page titles with <h1> tags. Even if I changed the tag to <h2> or <span> I could not get the text-size or color to change no matter what I did. So, I eventually ditched the template and started from scratch. It went quite smooth from that point, and I finished it the next day. Just a head’s up.