wordpress general question issue

How to Fix WordPress stuck in Maintenance Mode

Last Updated on April 20, 2022 by WP Knowledge Hub

As soon as you make an update to a theme or plugin, WordPress goes into maintenance mode. Trying to view your site while WordPress is in maintenance mode will show you a temporary message that says: Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.

During Maintenance Mode, a file called .maintenance is created in the root folder of WordPress.

This file tells WordPress to put your site into maintenance mode and it contains the information needed to display the message that will pop up for users.

Typically, when the update installation is done, WordPress will delete the .maintenance file and the message disappears and your site comes back online, but sometimes that doesn’t happen.

On rare occasions, the .maintenance file fails to be deleted automatically and you’ll need FTP access to do it manually.

How to delete the .maintenance file in WordPress

To start, log in to your hosting panel (like cPanel or Plesk) or use an FTP client like FileZilla or Cyberduck. Once you access your root directory, you can see a file called .maintenance. Simply delete it here, and the problem is solved.

Try refreshing your website, and you will see the maintenance message is gone.