Are you getting an HTTP error when uploading images to your WordPress website?
This can be really frustrating! This error is a fairly generic error message that indicates something went wrong with the upload and there could be several causes and fixes. Let’s walk through them so that hopefully you can get back to uploading photos to your website without this pesky WordPress HTTP error.
One caveat to preface several of these solutions: it’s possible you could break your website if something goes wrong during troubleshooting. Ensure you have a current backup of your site before you begin, just in case something bad happens. I’d go through these steps in this order:
Decrease Image Size
One quick thing to check is to ensure that you’re uploading images that are appropriately sized for the web. Make sure that you’ve resized and saved them appropriately (JPGs or PNGs).
On Good Hosting? Contact Support
If you have a good web hosting company (either managed hosting through a service like WP Engine or solid shared hosting such as that from SiteGround – both of whom are Tech Photo Guy partners), contact their support folks. A good web host will understand this issue and should be able to work you through a solution quickly. If your host doesn’t see to know how (or want) to help, I’d consider better hosting, but in the meantime here are some other things to try.
Server Memory Limits
One possible cause is that you’ve hit a limit with the amount of memory allocated to the web server. Adding this line to your wp-config.php file can help:
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64MB');
You can gradually increase this amount, say up to 256MB. This will only work if your hosting package has that amount of memory available to you.
Special Characters in Filenames
Occasionally a WordPress HTTP error will come from something as innocent as a filename with a character that’s problematic for the web server. Some special characters (such as the apostrophe) will cause problems. Underscores and dashes (_ and -) are fine, but double check if you have odd characters.
Plugin Conflicts
It’s possible you have a plugin installed that’s causing an issue.
While it could be any plugin that’s the problem, if you have any image compression plugins installed, start by disabling those and seeing if you’re able to upload.
If things are still not working, temporarily disable all of your plugins and see if the upload problem persists. If you still can’t upload, go ahead and re-enable all of the plugins. On the other hand, if disabling plugins allowed you to upload without an issue, enable them one at a time, checking to see when you start having upload problems. At that point you will know that the WordPress http error when uploading is either related to the plugin you just enabled, or a conflict between that plugin and another enabled plugin.
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