Easy Fix for "An Error Occurred in the Upload. Please Try Again Later.

WordPress is popular, period.

But “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later” is one such WordPress error that you might have stumbled upon while using WordPress. There’s nothing to worry about though. It’s a common error even if you’re running the latest version of WordPress.

You can start right off the bat by checking the folders and file permissions. Your hosting server won’t allow the upload and throws the error if there are any issues with the permissions.

One reason for this error to occur is that the file owner may not have “write” access to the account. Another reason for the error is that your folder permissions might have been revoked due to security breaches or malware threats. Although it’s not an absolute certainty that your folders have been infected, you cannot rule it out as a possibility. The same goes for your files.  

To ensure your folders and files have correct permissions for upload on your remote host server, use an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) client such as FileZilla to access and check for them. Here’s how.

1. Right-click on the folder /wp-content/uploads from your FTP client.
2. Select the “File Permissions” option, check the owner permissions, and set the Numeric value to 755 or 750 for directories or folders. For files, set the Numeric value to 644.

You’re all set with your uploads now. Go ahead and try uploading now.

You can consider clearing or flushing out the cache and cookies from your browser to prevent the “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later” error. Sometimes, your cache and cookies get corrupted or outdated. These files may cause conflicts or errors when you try to upload a file to a website or platform.

If you are on Chrome browser, you can use in-built Chrome options to clear out cache and cookies data. Alternatively, you can use the BetterBugs Chrome free extension to free up your cache, cookies, and session data to help avoid the “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later” error.

Built-in Option to Clear Cache and Cookies for Chrome

Here’s how to clear the cache and cookies of your Chrome browser with Chrome’s built-in options.

1. Go to chrome://settings/privacy
2. Select the “Privacy and security” option from the left side menu
3. Click Clear browsing data
4. Check the “Cookies and other site data” and “Cached images and files” options. Make sure to uncheck the “Browsing history” option to prevent clearing your browsing data
5. Select the “Time range” to be considered for clearing data
6. Hit “Clear data”

BetterBugs to Clear Cache and Cookies for Chrome

Here’s how to clear the cache, cookies, and session data of your Chrome browser with BetterBugs:

1. Download the BetterBugs Chrome extension.
2. Select the “Cleanup” icon from the extension.  
3. Check “Clear Cache” and “Clear Cookies”. You can also check the “Clear Local & Session” to clean up your session data.
4. Hit “Clear”.

It’s done. If the “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later” error is popping up due to browser cache issues, it should resolve. You can try uploading the file to your WordPress site and see if it works now.

Occasionally, the error can occur because of a conflict or an issue with one of your plugins. This can happen if the plugin is outdated, incompatible, or poorly coded.

You can troubleshoot this by deactivating all your plugins and reactivating them one at a time. This can be very effective while funneling out a defective plugin when you don’t know first-hand which plugin is causing the issue. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open your WordPress Dashboard and select the “Plugins” page from the dashboard sidebar.
2. Select all the plugins from the checkbox visible near “Plugin”.
3. Open the “Bulk Actions” dropdown, select “Deactivate”, and click Apply.

Enable the plugins one by one and check if any plugin behaves weird. Check for the file upload again and see if the issue has been dealt with.

If you’re still iffy about disabling all plugins at once and have some idea of what plugin may be problematic, you can also disable and enable one plugin at a time and check the results.

For instance, you might encounter the “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later” error while using some image compression or optimization plugins for your WordPress site.

Here’s how to disable and re-enable a single WordPress plugin.

1. Open the “Plugins” page from your “WordPress Dashboard” sidebar menu.
2. Select the plugin that you suspect to be the faulty one.
3. Click the “Deactivate” link under the Plugin to disable it and enable it again.

See if the error is gone while trying to upload your file.

The “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later” error can also occur when your WordPress site runs out of PHP memory during the upload process.  This can happen if you have many plugins or themes installed or if your site receives a lot of traffic.

Another reason may be the shared hosting of your WordPress. Less or insufficient memory allocation can force WordPress to throw the error.

Apart from this error, the “503 Service Unavailable” message might also appear meaning that your server is unable to handle your requests. Your server is running low on memory with currently allocated resources. Hence, the error.

To get rid of these errors, you need to increase the memory limit for your PHP backend. Make sure to check for the maximum memory allowed from your WordPress host server before increasing the limit.

Here’s how to increase the PHP memory limit for WordPress:

1. Open for wp-config.php file from the main directories of your WordPress site host server.
2. Insert the code “define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' );” in the file and save.

Go ahead and try uploading your file to WordPress.

Another fix to the “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later” error is modifying your .htaccess file available from your FTP client on the host server or with the WordPress cPanel.

Here’s how to access the .htaccess file using the cPanel and the modifications you need to do:

• Access the File Manager from your cPanel.
• Go to the public_html folder.
• Open your WordPress folder, usually named wp.
• Right-click the .htaccess file to edit it. If it is hidden, turn on the option to Show Hidden Files in the File Manager’s Settings located in the top right menu.
• Add the code “SetEnv MAGICK_THREAD_LIMIT 1” in the .htaccess file and save.

You’re good to go. Retry uploading the file and see if it gets rid of the error.

So, what happens is that when you have a server on a shared hosting plan and you try to upload a file, your server tries to use multiple CPU threads while uploading your file.

Threads are the sequence of instructions run by your CPU. This multi-thread usage of CPU is done by Imagick, which is the default image-processing handler in WordPress.

Imagick tries to upload images as fast as possible using multi-threading, which can lead to the “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later” error especially when you are hosted on a shared server.

“SetEnv MAGICK_THREAD_LIMIT 1” sets the thread limit to 1, which means that your upload will get processed as one unified instruction sequence running on just 1 thread of CPU. This prevents the “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later” error from popping up.

You can get rid of the “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later” by trying the fixes mentioned in the article. If you’re still facing the issue, try to check your internet connection, restart your router, or consider doing the upload with a different browser. If nothing works, please contact the support team of your WordPress host provider.