Can’t fix – Site slowed down significantly after installing Wordfence

GT Metrix, Pagespeed insights etc. show: Reduce initial server response time

The GT Metrix score fell from 90+ to 70 (!!!)

This happened after installing Wordfence (without even setting it up at all).

Without a license I couldn’t adjust any settings inside the tool and trying to get a free license was impossible because of an error that Cloudflare blocks adding the site after which I added my own IP to the cloudflare firewall settings which didn’t work either.

After noticing the site performance tanking I decided to deactivate Wordfence and picked the option to delete all data. Then I ran the Wordfence Assistant plugin to get rid of the rest.

All URLs seem to redirect and defer to something that looks like this /?v=79cba11XXXX

Since I only have read access to the information_schema with my host I can’t delete any of the Wordfence 7 tables via phpMyAdmin (as mentioned here: https://www.wordfence.com/help/advanced/remove-or-reset/). It seems that in my own database I can’t find any of these entries.

Also I couldn’t locate wordfence, wflogs and wordfence-waf.php inside FTP

my .user.ini and .htcaccess files don’t have any of the comments “Wordfence WAF” and “END Wordfence WAF”. and I do not have a php.ini file in my root folder.

of course I cleared cache multiple times, disabled other apps just to make sure and waited for a bit but nothing resolves the issue…

what else can I do to fix this bug that your app caused?

this shouldn’t break my entire site