Unable to install Wordpress from the WP Toolkit on a Linux Plesk server: Unable to download the WordPress package

• Upon updating WordPress, a plugin or a theme via WP Toolkit, the following error appears within the Plesk GUI:

  Unable to download the WordPress 6.5.5 package from https://wordpress.org/. Please try again later or contact the server administrator.

• Downloading WordPress manually will work, because no time limit is involved there:

  # curl -O https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
  # wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

• Errors that are similar to the following can be see in the /var/log/plesk/panel.log:

  CONFIG_TEXT: [2026-03-06 18:45:46.911] 1127556:69aab03c88d9f ERR [extension/wp-toolkit] Attempt 1 to download WordPress 6.9.1 package was failed: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 15000 milliseconds with 10759779 out of 28685823 bytes received (see https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-errors.html) for https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.9.1.zip

  CONFIG_TEXT: [2026-03-06 18:46:01.951] 1127556:69aab03c88d9f ERR [extension/wp-toolkit] All 3 attempts to download WordPress 6.9.1 package were failed with the following errors:
  Attempt 1: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 15000 milliseconds with 1023           5491 out of 28685823 bytes received (see https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-           errors.html) for https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.9.1.zip
  Attempt 2: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 15000 milliseconds with 1075           9779 out of 28685823 bytes received (see https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-           errors.html) for https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.9.1.zip
  Attempt 3: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 15000 milliseconds with 1072           7011 out of 28685823 bytes received (see https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-           errors.html) for https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.9.1.zip

Cause

By default, WP Toolkit has a standard HTTP timeout of 15 seconds.

# plesk ext wp-toolkit --config -operation list | grep httpTimeout
httpTimeout 15

When you test the download time via curl, you can see that the archive of WP cannot be downloaded to the server within the 15 second limit:

# curl -L --fail --max-time 60 -o /dev/null \
 -w 'namelookup: %{time_namelookup}s connect: %{time_connect}s appconnect: %{time_appconnect}s starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}s total: %{time_total}s speed_download: %{speed_download}B/s\n' \
 https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.9.1.zip
 % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 27.3M  100 27.3M    0     0   721k      0  0:00:38  0:00:38 --:--:--  738k

Due to this, since the WP installation archive cannot be downloaded within the expected 15 second limit, all subsequent actions fail and WP cannot be installed.

Resolution

1. Log into your server via SSH

2. Raise the download time limit for the archive file of WP from https://wordpress.org/ to a higher value by executing the following command:

# plesk ext wp-toolkit --config -operation set -option-name httpTimeout -option-value 60

Note: The example above raises the time limit to 60 seconds, however if this is still not enough, increase the time limit further.

It is also recommended that you contact your server provides in order to find out why your server's download speed from https://wordpress.org is so low.