How to Fix WordPress Stuck in Maintenance Mode (Quick Fix)

This quick guide walks you through fixing a WordPress site that’s stuck in maintenance mode. This problem shows up as both the front-end and admin area of your site displaying nothing but “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

A WordPress site can get stuck in maintenance mode like this when a WordPress update process (usually a plugin update) fails midstream. It’s pretty alarming: you can’t see the front end of your site, and you can’t access the admin area either. So what do you do?

Fortunately, disabling maintenance mode in WordPress is pretty simple if you know what to do.

How to Stop Your WordPress Site From Being “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance”

Important: Before you start fixing this issue, it’s a good idea to back up your site if you can access it through your hosting control panel. This gives you a safety net in case anything goes wrong.

Now, here’s how to fix the problem:

1. Get access to the file system on your server. My preferred method of this is (S)FTP, but you can also use cPanel File Manager or SSH. If you’re using an FTP client like FileZilla, make sure you have it set to show hidden files (in FileZilla, go to Server > Force showing hidden files).
2. Find, in the root of your WordPress install, the .maintenance file. This is the same folder that contains your wp-config.php file. The file starts with a period, which means it might be hidden by default. That’s why you need to enable showing hidden files in your FTP client or file manager.
3. Delete the .maintenance file that you found.
4. Reload your browser and you should see your site as normal.
5. (Optional) Clear your site’s cache. If you’re using a caching plugin or your host provides caching, clear the cache to make sure you’re seeing the updated version of your site.
6. (Optional) Check if something went wrong. It can, rarely, be the case that something went wrong when you got stuck in maintenance mode. If it is, you either need to manually fix the problem (with a plugin or theme) or else restore a backup from before the problem happened.

One good thing to note: by default, WordPress stores the time a site went into maintenance mode in the .maintenance file, and will stop paying attention to it after ten minutes. That means that if everything is behaving you’ll only have the error message “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” showing for ten minutes if this does happen to you via an unexpected server hiccup when running an update.

How to Prevent Your WordPress Site From Getting Stuck in Maintenance Mode in the First Place

Okay, it’s good to know you can FTP in and fix the problem, or wait ten minutes for it to resolve by itself. But this is still a pretty scary problem, and could be really bad on a high-traffic site. How do you prevent a WordPress site from getting stuck in maintenance mode in the first place?

The simple answer is: Update your plugins one-by-one. I’ve only ever seen this problem when I go through the “Installed Plugins” page and try to update them all at once. The multiple concurrent Ajax processes this triggers cause some sort of problem at the server level, and that’s the source of the maintenance mode error.

So simply wait for one plugin update to go from the yellow “Updating…” dialogue to the green “Completed!” dialogue before moving onto updating your next plugin, and you should almost never run into maintenance mode problems with WordPress.

Other tips to avoid maintenance mode issues:

• Don’t close your browser or navigate away during updates. One of the most common causes of getting stuck in maintenance mode is closing the browser window or refreshing the page while updates are running.
• Check plugin compatibility before updating. Make sure the plugins you’re updating are compatible with your current version of WordPress.
• Maintain a stable internet connection. Lost connections during updates can interrupt the process and leave the .maintenance file in place.

Hopefully you now know everything you need to remove a WordPress site from maintenance mode, and to stop your sites from getting stuck this way in the first place. Thanks for reading!