Common causes and solutions for 403 errors on WordPress plugin JS files

Solution 1:

Change the permissions of your directories and files to 775.

Example command (run via SSH or terminal):

chmod -R 775 /path/to/your/wordpress/folder

This gives read, write, and execute permissions to the owner and group, and read + execute permissions to others.

⚠️ Note: For security, WordPress generally recommends:

Directories: 755

Files: 644

Solution 2:

This error usually means that the web server does not have permission to access the file.

For example, on macOS, the web server runs under the user _www, so that user must have the proper permissions to read (and sometimes write to) the file or directory.