Although common, “The link you followed has expired” WordPress error can take you by surprise. It often occurs when you try to save a draft, publish a post, or convert the post into Pending status. Another frequent cause for the error is uploading WordPress plugin or theme files using the WordPress Admin Dashboard. Regardless of what the problem in your case is, the reason is usually tied to exceeding a certain limit. That limit usually applies to either time or file size. With that made clear, here’s how to fix “The link you followed has expired” error in WordPress right way.
Make a backup of your WordPress website (Recommended)
This is not a mandatory step, but one we strongly recommend. Even if everything goes right, you’ll still be grateful you had a failsafe in place. We’re referring to using a backup plugin for WordPress before you start tinkering with settings.
1. Increase the maximum file size
The most common way to solve “The link you followed has expired” error in WordPress is to increase the maximum file upload size in WordPress. Keep in mind that you can’t increase the file size uploading limit indefinitely, or sometimes at all. This limitation is set during the WordPress installation, and usually by your hosting provider.
2. Expand the maximum execution time limit
It makes sense that WordPress has a limit on maximum execution time. Otherwise, if a user uploads too large a file or executes too complex/buggy script the process can idle for hours, hogging resources meanwhile. That’s also what happens if you stay on an open post in WordPress and try to save it after a few hours. Even worse, the action might crash the server your website is hosted on, leading to downtime for you and others. To fix this, we already wrote a guide on how to fix “Fatal error: Maximum execution time exceeded“ in WordPress.
3. Increase the limit of PHP memory
The limit here serves an identical purpose as method 2, except that it prevents a function from running too long. With that said, we also covered the WordPress memory exhausted error fix in detail.
4. Try to upload via FTP
None of the methods produced results so far? It’s time to move away from accessing the WordPress Admin Section, then. Instead, access your WordPress website via FTP and try to upload files that way. The limits might not exist or could be increased by your hosting, thus becoming an easy solution to “The link you followed has expired” WordPress error.
5. Contact your hosting Customer Support
If nothing changed, the “The link you followed has expired” error fix might be out of your hands. We recommend reaching out to the Customer Care team on your hosting website. You can send an e-mail, write an internal ticket, or start a 24/7 live chat. If they can’t help, they’ll at least give you an educated guess. In our opinion, your current payment plan is most likely limited in size. Furthermore, you might share the server with far too many other users. If so, all you need to do is upgrade to a payment plan with more storage space, and ask for your website to be transferred to another server. Then, try methods 1 through 3 or ask your hosting to boost the numbers for you.