Help! My file won’t upload to WordPress

You want to upload a great image, or a pdf file, or a spreadsheet, or a …. The list goes on. We can share files through our WordPress blogs and websites using the Media, Add New option in the Dashboard – not just images.

Sometimes, however, we may get the message “Error saving media attachment.” or we are told that the file is too big – this latter make it nice and clear where the problem lies, but that first one can have us stumped – yes, us too – just the other week we had this and did not look at the most likely reason straightaway – hence this post!

“Error saving media attachment.”

The first thing to do is check the settings. In your Dashboard go to Settings, Media and look in the Uploading Files section, the Store uploads in this folder. WordPress tells you that the default is wp-content/uploads and if you have something different to this, change it. Most times this will be the cause of the problem.

Of course there may be other reasons but for those we’d generally want to dig a bit deeper and look at permissions and things – for those we usually Google the issue or pop to the WordPress.org forum to see what others have done with the same problem. We’re always here to help if you want to run it by us – pop an email to hello@blogmistress.com with as much information as you can and we’ll take a look.

If your file is too big

Your file is bigger than your server is set up to allow. Let’s face it, if we were allowed to upload files of any size willy-nilly, our lovely WordPress blog or website would soon be creaking.

So – how do you know if your file is too big? Well when you go to upload your image you should be able to see how big it is in bytes (take a look at the video).

How do you know how big a file you’re allowed to upload? If you go to Media, Add New it will tell you the Maximum Upload file size there.

If you have a once-off need to upload a bigger file, you can of course do it the old-fashioned “manual” way using FTP, but do have a think about how long your file may take to load.

If you want to be able to upload larger files regularly, you’ll need to change the settings and may need to talk to your hosts about that. We’ll cover this in another blog post soon.

If you’re ever unsure, just ask the team here and we’ll help you.