Have you filled up your WordPress storage quota or limit?

In a WordPress multi-site installation you might see a message saying you have exceeded your storage quota when uploading a new media file or image. This is an easy thing to fix if you control your own WordPress network.

1 Jan, 2013

I have just upgraded one of my WordPress multi-site “network” installations to version 3.5. This all went smoothly, but when I tried to add a new image to my media library I got an error message that said…

‘Sorry, you have used all of your storage quota of 10mb’

I don’t recall ever setting a limit for my WordPress storage quota, and there was no such limit imposed by my website hosting company. So, here’s our solution to the problem.

Wordpress upload quota exceeded message text

I have exceeded my WordPress upload quota

It turns out that you can set a limit for each website within a WordPress network (a WordPress network, previously known as multi-site, allows a number of sites to use the same WordPress installation). If you have created the network yourself then you may well know this, but if you haven’t you might need some help resolving the problem.

How to increase my WordPress storage quota

1. Log in to your WordPress site and navigate to ‘My Sites’–>’Network Admin’–>’Dashboard’

2. Select ‘Settings’–>’Network Settings’

3. Find the ‘Site upload space’ field and increase the storage limit (or un-check the box to remove any limits – best done only if you have total control over all sites in your network)

4. Save changes

changing the WordPress storage quota / limit

The storage quota field in WordPress

17 Comments

  1. Pradyumna

    My WP shows the error using 500mb, Gonna try this solution now, Thanks.

    Reply
    • Martin Jarvis

      Let us know if that works for you.

      Thanks for the comment.

      Reply
  2. Argha Link

    THANK YOU…
    THANK YOU…
    THANK YOU…
    THANK YOU…

    I spent the whole day just to resolved the issue.. Even, GoDaddy agents were struggling to give solution….

    Reply
  3. Faisal Alqarni

    OMG THANKS

    Reply
  4. mvc

    thanks . was really helpful

    Reply
  5. Molly

    Thank you – quick and helpful tip.

    Reply
  6. Prem

    Thank you

    Reply
  7. Tunde

    Wow. Thank you! You just saved me hours of troubleshooting. I have been trying different solution in my Cpanel until I found this page. Thank you again.

    Reply
  8. quentin

    I have been down this path and all I get is a “403 FORBIDDEN access to this resource on the server is denied”

    Reply
    • Martin Jarvis

      I haven’t seen that issue before Quentin. It might be worth checking with your hosts to see if they can help. Also, sometimes resetting your permalinks can fix these sorts of problems. So just go to ‘Settings’->’Permalinks’ and click ‘Save changes’ without changing anything. One final thought – do you have any security plugins active on the site? If so, temporarily deactivate it and see if that fixes your problem.

      Reply
  9. Jeff

    Thank you so much, this worked for me!

    Reply
  10. GBee

    I think remove limits will give the right to all other users to upload as much images as they want. Is the best way to tackle thing challenge increasing the limit to 100MB?

    Reply
    • Martin Jarvis

      No, I don’t think it’s a good idea just to increase the limit without doing some research into why your users need the space. Some sites just naturally outgrow their initial limits – if people upload regularly over a few years, then it’s probably ok to increase the limit. Educating users about optimising their file sizes BEFORE uploading to the website is a good idea. Some housekeeping of older media files might help too – can you remove older files, for example? Can you run an image optimiser (such as imagify.io) against the existing images to reduce their file sizes?

      Reply
  11. matt

    Fixed my problem. thank you for the help!

    Reply
  12. alex

    i have been endlessly searching and trying to apply this very setting to my wordpress single sites to limit each to 5gb, as putting them on a multisite configuration will put them all at risk if any of them is individually infected, and i couldn’t find one solution to limit a single wordpress s’max usable space

    Reply
  13. Nijil Alakkal

    Hi I am not seeing network option available in my settings.

    Reply
  14. Randy N.

    This article helped me solved my Multisite files upload issue. Kudos to Martin Jarvix.

    Reply

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