Your problem seems to be related with a misconfiguration of the temporary directory in PHP which is used for uploads and need to be writable when the sever downloads a WordPress, plugin or theme package. If you can not configure it at PHP level, you can define it also in wp-config.php file: define(‘WP_TEMP_DIR’, ABSPATH . … Read more
For the .htaccess-question, Stephen has a nice answer to that here: WordPress will overwrite the entries between ‘# BEGIN WordPress’ and ‘# END WordPress’. While most plugins will create their own begin and end tags and only update within those tags. Simply put your custom entries outside of any custom tags/comments and they SHOULD be … Read more
What version did you update to? The following has only been tested in 4.7.3 (and I never use custom backgrounds in the customizer, so I’m not sure what previous version of WP did there). In the customizer, when you set the custom background image, there should be an “Image Size” dropdown. You probably have “Original … Read more
Updating WordPress through the dashboard will only affect WordPress files. No other files will be touched. Do the updates in the admin dashboard. Only files that need to be updated will be updated. Even WordPress files that don’t need updating will not be touched.
Please read documentation. https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/plugin-assets/#plugin-icons Filenames #Filenames Normal: icon-128×128.(png|jpg) High-DPI (Retina): icon-256×256.(png|jpg) SVG: icon.svg
Plugin settings are generally saved via the WordPress database. For example, if you were manually updating the plugin Contact Form 7 via your FTP, your form settings would not be overwritten because these live in the database. However, if you have edited the core plugin files via your server (this includes style alterations or other … Read more
Your content (data) is stored in the database. If you don’t update the content, it will remain unchanged. Themes are mostly for data presentation (if there is no niche specialization on updating content). So, in the majority of cases, when you change the theme files, you don’t change the content itself. To be sure you … Read more
Contact GoDaddy for support. It’s their server that’s having issues (a 500 error is a server configuration error).
Here is a section specific to suexec file permissions.
I guess ABSPATH defined in wp-config.php file now pointing not to root directory and that plugin trying to use this