Is your WordPress installation stuck in maintenance mode? Sometimes after a failed automatic upgrade, WordPress doesn’t disable maintenance mode, leaving a maintenance mode message on your site’s pages. Here I’ll tell you how to fix the problem.

When WordPress enables automatic upgrade, it creates a file called “.maintenance” in your WordPress folder. When it’s there, no matter what page in your blog you visit, you’ll get a blank page with a “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” message in it. To get rid of this, all you have to do is to navigate to your WordPress installation folder and remove the file named “.maintenance“. This file is set to be a hidden file by default, so you may have to set your FTP client (or file manager) to be able to view hidden files and folders. Just delete the file, and that should do the trick.

If you see errors with your plug-ins after you’ve deleted the file, you can try deactivating all your plug-ins. You can achieve this by renaming your “plugins” folder. The plug-ins folder is located in “<_your_wordpress_folder_>/wp-content/”. After you’ve renamed the plug-ins folder to something else, log into your DashBoard. By navigating to your Plugins page you should notice that all of your plug-ins are gone. Now go back, rename the ex-plugins folder to “plugins” again and refresh the WordPress Plugins page. All of the plugins should be visible now, continue by activating them all.

The best thing to remember is to take a backup of your WP folder and your WP database/table before you upgrade WordPress itself (before upgrading plugins is also recommended). Then if something goes wrong, you can simply put that backup to use.  And you should take regular backups of your site anyway!

Thanks for reading, don’t forget to leave a comment below if you have any critique or questions.