Recently I was migrating a WordPress site away from Godaddy hosting. Normally I just remove a few extra entries in the wp-config.php file but this time I started having issues uploading new plugins. I am not sure if this was from a WordPress version upgrade or the site being transferred from Godaddy but here is some simple steps to take to fix the issue.
- The first step is to check the ownership and permissions for the wp-content and the wp-content/uploads folders. These folders need to be set to 755 and be owned by the user running your web server for the upload to work. Check this and if a fix is necessary then try to upload a plugin after changing the folders, it just might work. If this works then no need to go to the next step!
- The second step, is to check to see if an upload_path option is stored in the [prefix]options table of your WordPress database. If it is, make sure it is set to the appropriate directory.
Source: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/unable-to-create-directory-uploads-is-its-parent-directory-writable-by/