Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

Fixing WordPress 502 errors caused by incorrect WP-Optimise plugin permissions

Published on 31st August 2025 Estimated Reading Time: 1 minute

When I started getting a 502 status error on saving a WordPress post, it naturally was concerning, even if I found that the post was saved in the background. Inspection of the Nginx error log was in order, given that an invalid response was triggering the Bad Gateway message. That revealed that the WP-Optimise plugin was triggering the error when trying to access a location on the server. The cause was having incorrect permissions, which was sorted by something like the following:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads/wpo
chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads/wpo

If it were to happen to you, the location may be different, as mine is for me. What you see above is the default. The chown command is assigning www-data as the owner and group for the specified location, with the -R switch triggering recursion for this action. After that, the chmod command is assigning full permissions for the owner, as well as read and execute for everyone else. All of this is to enable WP-Optimise to update its logs, the failure of which was causing the 502 messages in the first place.

Keywords

Just click on one of these terms to find more like this:

Add a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Please be aware that comment moderation is enabled and may delay the appearance of your contribution.

  • The content, images, and materials on this website are protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, or published in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned on this website are the property of their respective owners. Unauthorised use or duplication of these materials may violate copyright, trademark and other applicable laws, and could result in criminal or civil penalties.

  • All comments on this website are moderated and should contribute meaningfully to the discussion. We welcome diverse viewpoints expressed respectfully, but reserve the right to remove any comments containing hate speech, profanity, personal attacks, spam, promotional content or other inappropriate material without notice. Please note that comment moderation may take up to 24 hours, and that repeatedly violating these guidelines may result in being banned from future participation.

  • By submitting a comment, you grant us the right to publish and edit it as needed, whilst retaining your ownership of the content. Your email address will never be published or shared, though it is required for moderation purposes.

Copyright © 2007-2025, TechnologyTales.com