New WordPress Won’t Upload Themes

WordPress is well-known as a content management system that is very easy to install and use. Yet, sometimes you might find yourself frustrated with an error that does not seems logical at all.
Not being able to upload your theme can be a strange problem and we are going to cover the most common problems regarding theme uploading on the newest WordPress release.

Uploading Wrong Format

If you are trying to upload a format different from .zip, you will encounter an error message. WordPress theme uploader does not expect anything else than a .zip file, so a .rar won’t work. If you have your theme in a .rar format, right-click on the archive, go to Archive format, change it to ZIP and save it. Then you will be able to upload your theme.

Exceeded Memory Limits

Some hosting providers have limitations in the memory limits that they provide and thus if your theme exceeds these limits, the installation process will crash and throw an error “Fatal Error: Allowed memory size of … bytes exhausted”. Still, if you face this issue don’t worry.
There are two easy ways to fix this.
1) Go to your cPanel and change the Memory Limit field to 256M, save and you are done.
2) Log into your hosting with any FTP software, open your wp-config.php file with some text editor, and add this line of code :
define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’ ); Save and exist. Your issue should be fixed.

File Size Limits Exceeded

Similarly to the memory, the file size limits can be easily exceeded with some hosting plans. If you exceed your file size limitations you will face an error that looks like “The uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize directive in php.ini“. To fix this issue, go to your wp-admin folder and find the php.ini file. If you can’t see such a file, create a new text file with a notepad and save it with the name of php.ini. Then open it and add the following code to it: upload_max_filesize = 1000M.
This will increase the bytes that you can upload to your WordPress and you will be able to freely upload your themes or plugins.
HTTP redirect status code must be a redirection code
The “HTTP redirect status code must be a redirection code, 3xx” error sometimes occurs among WordPress installations. The 3xx redirection means – further action needs to be taken to complete the request”.

All of the 3xx errors are considered redirection messages. These codes indicate that your browser should take additional actions to complete your request and access your desired destination. The easiest way to fix this problem will be to call your hosting provider for further investigation and they will be able to advise you or fix it for you.
Still, if you want to try to fix it by yourself, we would suggest a few things that you can try.

Tips and Tricks

First off, install the Site Health plugin and run it so it can check for issues and give you some information that might be helpful for you in terms of fixing.
Another thing that you can try is to open the /public_html folder of your website and search for .htaccess file. The default .htaccess file should look like:
“IfModule mod_rewrite.c”

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
“/IfModule”

If you see anything strange in yours, make a copy of it so you have a backup, delete everything and paste the code that we provided. Save it and exit. This should fix any .htaccess related issues.