If you’ve been using WordPress for a period, you may have encountered a common issue – the ‘Add New Plugin’ menu suddenly going missing from your dashboard. This can be frustrating, especially if you rely on plugins to enhance your website’s functionality. Plugins are very important for WordPress development. In this article, we will walk you through the steps to how to fix this bug/issue and back to the ‘Add New Plugin/Button’ menu in your WordPress dashboard.

Understanding the Problem

First, we need to analyze the ‘Add New Plugin/Button’ menu not showing in the WP dashboard. This main reason to occur issue due to various reasons, such as conflicts with other plugins, theme compatibility issues, or even incorrect user permissions.

Checking Plugin Conflicts

Go to your WP dashboard and navigate to the ‘Plugins’ section. Deactivate all your plugins simultaneously. If this will not work then you can do it by using FTP. If the ‘Add New Plugin’ menu reappears, the issue is plugin-related.

Checking Theme Compatibility

Many times, the theme you’re using might not be fully compatible with the latest WordPress version or you are using the old version, causing menu disappearance. Go to the WP dashboard in the appearance section and then the theme. Activate the default WordPress theme and check ‘Add New Plugin’ button is visible or not. If it is visible then there will theme issue and you need to contact the developer to fix this.

Final Solution

The missing ‘Add New Plugin’ menu in WordPress is an issue caused by various factors. Ultimately, after many hours of research, I got the solution and it worked fine. So let me show you what you need to do:

Open FTP and connect to your site. Then find the ‘wp-config.php’ file, you can find this file in the root directory. Open the file and search this code

define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true);
define('DISALLOW_FILE_MODS', true);.

You need to simply change the ‘true’ to ‘false’, and save it. Open your WP dashboard and check that your ‘Add New Plugin’ menu will be visible.