Manually Disabling WordPress Maintenance Mode

If you have a wordpress site more than likely you spend time updating plugins and your wordpress version.  You get used to hitting the “update now” link for your plugins and going on your merry way after everything is updated.  Today I did just that on a site I run called, Fishing Trips Today  While updating the second plugin, I received an “internal sever error” message.  After that, anything I tried gave me a message saying, “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute”  This was followed by a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

When updates run, wordpress is put in maintenance mode for that brief period of time to prevent something else from writing to the database during the update, which could cause corruption.  If the update fails it is possible that wordpress would not be taken out of maintenance mode, as would be the cause during a successful update.  Luckily, taking wordpress out of maintenance mode manually is pretty easy.

Access the root folder where your wordpress installation resides using sftp or as I do, use the file manager in your control panel if you have this capability. You should find a file in this directory named “.maintenance”  Simply delete this file and you should be back in action, and the update can be tried again.  Always make sure you have a good backup up your site before doing updates in case something more catastrophic occurs and you can’t recover.