If your Smartcat licence won’t activate, there could be a few things going on. These are the most common reasons a licence won’t activate.

1. LICENCE ACTIVATION LIMITS

Unless you have an unlimited license, Smartcat products have a number of site limit attached to them. If you have a single domain license, you will not be able to activate your product on more than one domain. If you wish to use your single license on more than one domain, you will need to upgrade your license. You can do so by logging in to your account here: http://159.223.176.29/account/

For more details on upgrading licenses, please click here.

If you have moved your site, or changed the domain, you will need to de-activate the license from the old domain, before you can activate it on the new one. To learn how to do this, click here. Usually in this scenario, you will see an error saying: Your license key has reached its activation limit.

2. Technical Issues (cURL)

Please contact your hosting provider to determine whether cURL is enabled. cURL is a very common extension that most servers have enabled, and it is required for our activation server to send and receive a response. If your hosting provider is unable to turn on cURL, the Smartcat team can activate the plugin for you manually, with FTP login credentials to access your site. Please submit this information along with your licence number or receipt number in a support ticket to our Helpdesk.

3. Firewalls and Ports

If your webserver is behind a firewall, or if there are standard web server ports that are closed due to the network you’re on, your server admin will need to open the ports allowing your web server to send and receive data back to our licensing servers. This is required for you to be able to activate the product, and receive product updates. While this is a rare issue, it is common within certain organizations such as universities.

4. Security Plugins

Some password protected sites, or sites using maintenance mode plugins, are unable to communicate with our licensing system. If this is the case, please temporarily turn off your security plugin or maintenance mode plugin, to allow your server to communicate with ours and activate the product.