This can be due to many factors. Have you currently upgraded to a business plan?
WordPress.com users cannot install plugins unless they upgrade to the business plan which costs about $299 per year. If you are on a free, personal, or premium plan, then you cannot install third-party plugins.
Are you Facing Memory Limit Issues?
The second most common scenario is that you can see and access the plugins menu but unable to install plugins.
The failure notice is usually caused by the PHP memory limit. There are settings in your WordPress hosting and inside your WordPress core that define the amount of memory a PHP script can use. When a process reaches this limit, it either gets terminated or it gives an error like this:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted
The quick fix to this problem is increasing your PHP memory limit. You can do that by adding this line to your wp-config.php file:
1
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’);
User role restrictions
WordPress comes with a built-in user role management system. Sometimes web developers don’t give administrator access to their clients. Instead, they create an editor account for them.
I hope this could help you out.
Good luck,
Nelson
]]>Couple of questions.
Did you set up the site originally and have you ever been able to install plugins/themes?
Is it possible some kind of folder permissions were changed when you used file manager in your hosting account?
Pete
]]>Hi,
I was able to install plugins when I first setup the site until I tried to install the woo-commerce plugin, which resulted in a fatal error. I fixed this by renaming the plugins folder in my file manager. This has allowed me to access the website, but I cannot install any other plugins.Other than this i’m not sure what has caused the problem.
]]>If not that’s your issue.
Pete
]]>Renaming the plugins directory is usually a stopgap solution around a problem but you can run many plugins from the wrong directory. But you’ll probably need the original ‘plugins’ directory to install the next new plugin.
The old plugins that seem to be working in that one-off directory can be left where they are. As long as they are working they should be fine. It’s possible a future update of one of those plugins may refuse to work so do keep that in mind.
If you have further troubles installing plugins once you’ve recreated the plugins directory you’ll need to look at the ownership and permissions on that directory.
]]>