File Manager Missing After Renaming Plugins Directory

  • I am a part of the admin for a wordpress website and I have been running into multiple 504 Gateway Timeout issues for the past two weeks that shut down my website for up to multiple hours. I believed it was a plugin issue, so after looking through forums, I found multiple posts giving advice to deactivate the plugins folder by renaming it and then one-by-one reactivating plugins to pinpoint the root cause of the timeout errors. However, once I renamed the plugins folder to plugins.deactivated, my File Manager disappeared so I can no longer reactivate anything.

    My site is hosted using wordpress.com so I do not have access to any FTP credentials (additionally, nothing related to cPanel which I read was another tool most website owners have), and I also cannot install the File Manager plugin because the plugins directory does not exist. How can I regain access to my File Manager so that I can begin fixing my website?

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  • Hello @gudiyaapal,

    I hope things are going well for you.

    When we rename or delete the Plugin directory, then WordPress CMS will not able to recreate the same directory due to the file permission limitation.

    Aside from WordPress Admin access, you don’t have any access to sFTP, SSH, or the Hosting Panel File Manager. In that case, reaching out to Hosting support would be the only option, as you need any of the above accesses to rename or recreate the plugin directory.

    I tried to reproduce the same error on my local site:-
    Installation failed: Could not create directory.
    After replicating the issue, I tried a few things, such as reinstalling the WordPress core and updating the permalink or media, but none of them helped to resolve the problem.

    I looked for alternative solutions, but it wasn’t possible without SFTP or Hosting File Manager access.

    –
    Kind Regards,
    Imran Khan

    Your question refers to a website hosted at wordpress.COM. However, you are here in the forum of www.ads-software.com. The difference is explained here, for example:

    What’s the difference between www.ads-software.com and WordPress.com?

    Please contact the support of wordpress.COM with your request: https://wordpress.com/support/

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