Plugin installations fail/wrong path?

Hello (help!),

I have a brand new WP installation and I have manually updated to 3.91. Everything seems to be ok except that I am having problems installing Plugins. Take one specifically, which is Yoast’s SEO for WordPress… When I click to install, the installation hangs on Unpacking the package… and then does nothing. At that point a file called wordpress-SEO.tmp has been placed in my wp-contents folder (outside of the plugin folder where I think it should be?). It does this on other plugins too.

So… I tried to manually install by uploading to plugin folder. At this point the plugin appears in my installed plugin menu. But I can’t update it (again, I get a temp file outside of plugins folder) and I also get a white screen when accessing through the plugin editor. Like it is not there.

Generally speaking it appears the plugins do not have the correct path for downloading. I am very new at wordpress and am not sure if there is a simple define function I can add the config file to fix this or if there is something bigger going on. I want a completely stable platform before beginning a pretty large website.

I have a WP installation on a different computer for a different domain and i do not have this problem.

Also, I performed a manual WP update was because the 1-click update got hung up as well so I followed the manual install instruction from the codex. The clean install form host was very old—about 4 updates behind.

Any help would be crazy appreciated! Thanks!