Today, I tried to clean up a website I maintain by deleting some plugins that are no longer needed. In trying to bulk delete these plugins, I encountered an error. I discovered which plugin was the culprit, however, the error that WordPress gives me is not helpful and puts me into an endless loop.
The error message: Deletion failed: The link you followed has expired. Please try again.
So, I do as the error suggests and I click the checkbox, click the dropdown and select delete, then click the apply button. I’m greeted with the same error.
The song that doesn’t end starts playing in my head as frustration builds. A quick Google search leads me to WPBeginner and a few other sites explaining this error generally has to do with uploading files that are too large. In my case, I’m trying to delete a file.
In this situation, I’m not sure what the error message should say. I’d like it to be direct and tell me a few options to try in order to figure it out but then, the error would have to be tied to a specific circumstance so the directions don’t confuse the user even more if they don’t work.
In the end, I couldn’t figure out why the error was happening so I removed the plugin from the site via SFTP. It has been so long since I’ve needed to use SFTP, I almost installed a new client, not realizing I already had one installed. If you’ve encountered this error, how did you fix it?