Last Updated on November 19, 2020
Whenever you update your WordPress installation or any of the plugins via the WordPress dashboard, the website goes into ‘maintenance mode’ with a message displayed saying “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”
Maintenance mode is fine if it’s just for a minute, but if you’ve upgraded a plugin or WordPress and the message is still there, you can even find yourself locked out of the WordPress dashboard and instead of a website visitors get the maintenance message. Not good.
The recommended solution (and this has worked for me) is to connect via FTP to the root directory of the website and delete the .maintenance file.
That will take the site out of maintenance mode. If you get any errors after this, it is often due to an incomplete upgrade of WordPress or one of the plugins, so update everything again – you may have to do this manually via FTP if you can not access WordPress.
Not sure how to FTP to your site or need help with these types of issues? Then get in touch and we can assist.
