Trying to track down why a WordPress update won’t install can be frustrating. However, one of the first things you should check in these cases is has the domain exceeded the amount of disk space allotted to it. If the domain is over the disk space threshold, updates to plugins, themes, and core WordPress files will not install.

Many times this lack of disk space for a domain can be tracked down easily. Deleting some log files or compressing some graphic files etc will do the trick, but I was stumped the other day when I saw one of my domains was over capacity. The domain had been allocated 500MB of disk space but had exceeded it. The directory at fault was the public_html folder, not a logs folder or anything else. After hunting for several minutes to find the problem, I discovered the error_log file in the root directory of the WordPress site was a whopping 467MB by itself. This error_log had not been deleted since the site was created 3+ years ago and had continued to grow in size every month.

Downloading and reviewing the error_log file, I discovered a couple plugins that had PHP errors in them that were filling the log file each time someone viewed the site. Updating and/or removing these plugins helped stop the errors from accumulating. Then I accessed the site via FTP and deleted the error_log file completely.

This reduced the amount of disk space needed by the site and allowed all the plugins to update correctly.

 

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