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Solve WordPress Update Cannot be Installed because "we will be unable to copy some files"

Written by Dan Mossop

When trying to update Divi Booster (or any other WordPress plugin, for that matter), you may receive the following error:

Update Failed: The update cannot be installed because we will be unable to copy some files. This is usually due to inconsistent file permissions.

This issue is usually caused by incorrect file permissions on your server (rather than being a problem with the plugin itself). Basically, WordPress isn't able to properly access its own plugins folder, and as a result can't put the updated Divi Booster files in there.

It should be possible to solve this by following the instructions in this post:

https://www.ostraining.com/blog/wordpress/file-permissions/

In the "list of critical files and folders" make sure that the "wp-content/" and "wp-content/plugins/" directories are set to the recommended permissions.

If you're not comfortable doing this yourself, your webhost may be able to make the necessary permissions changes for you.

Once the permissions issue has been resolved you should now, if all is well, be able to update the plugin successfully in the WordPress plugins listing.

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About Dan Mossop

Dan is a Scottish-born web developer, now living in Brisbane with his wife and son. He has been sharing tips and helping users with Divi since 2014. He created Divi Booster, the first Divi plugin, and continues to develop it along with 20+ other Divi plugins. Dan has a PhD in Computer Science, a background in web security and likes a lot of stuff, 

14 Comments

  1. Raj on September 2, 2022 at 7:47 pm

    Thanks for the info. Searched everywhere but couldn't find the exact solution to this. Fixed after updating the file permissions. Thanks.

    Reply
    • dan on September 2, 2022 at 8:34 pm

      Glad it helped, Raj :)

      Reply
  2. Joe Boy on June 3, 2021 at 2:53 pm

    This saved me a whole lot of time. Thanks

    Reply
  3. Thiago Silva on May 21, 2019 at 8:12 pm

    Tks for your help!

    Reply
  4. skyn3t on May 7, 2019 at 9:12 am

    sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

    Reply
    • dan on May 8, 2019 at 6:56 am

      Thanks skyn3t :)

      Reply
    • isa on July 31, 2019 at 2:05 am

      Thank you so much.. it works!

      Reply
    • Jero on February 24, 2020 at 11:35 pm

      This is the most direct solution I found!
      Thanks for sharing @skyn3t

      Reply
    • Adson on May 27, 2020 at 6:20 pm

      Thanks @skyn3t, I had this error for some time, put your code on SSH, and voila… Worked perfectly.

      Reply
    • Mac Ruben on August 16, 2020 at 3:16 pm

      Thanks ds work and solve the issue. Thumb up

      Reply
    • Panther_rule on January 26, 2021 at 2:22 pm

      Thanks it works

      Reply
    • Ahmed on December 5, 2023 at 9:38 pm

      Perfect.

      Reply
  5. Andrew on March 14, 2018 at 2:04 am

    Text on this page is garbled.

    Reply
    • dan on March 14, 2018 at 8:04 am

      Hi Andrew, thanks for letting me know. It looks like the line-height on my text modules had got messed up. It should be fixed now but let me know if not. Cheers!

      Reply

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