Today while performing a WordPress upgrade on another blog the update failed! Grrr. If that wasn’t enough of a problem, when I checked the site it was stuck in “Maintenance” mode – meaning that no matter what you tried to do the only thing that showed up was a page telling you the site was in “Maintenance Mode”.
I Googled like a madman, and searched the WordPress site too, but there is no documentation as to what to do to get it out of this mode! So, I fired up my FTP browser and manually performed a complete upgrade of WordPress. Still no luck!
Next I checked the .htaccess file to see if the system had added some sort of line to it, but no luck. Finally, I noticed a strange file in the root of the site called .maintenance. The date stamp was just minutes old, so I deleted it and VOILA, the site was back to normal.
So, if you are unable to load WordPress because it’s stuck in Maintenance mode, just FTP into the root directory and delete the .maintenance file. Too bad this wasn’t documented somewhere, and too bad that with this in place you can’t even access the WP Admin area. Sheesh…
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
The exact same thing happened to me today! I had to contact tech support for help. I couldn’t find any documentation either. More people need to know about this. Thanks for posting.
Tanks for the post! I am now starting to build a blog using wordpress and am having a very hard time!!! lol…..I guess I need to buy a wordpress book to get a blog that looks as good as this one! lol
Nice Post,
Thanks For information, This information is very usefull for me.
THANK YOU!!! You just saved me from hours searching and reinstall nightmare.. ;)
A very interesting post. I have been using wordpress for the last couple of years. I absolutely love the platform. It is growing and improving all the time and will stay at the front of blogging for years to come.
I personally have not had that problem with the maintenance mode plugin, however, i have had various problems with others. The problems are always encountered because of the frequency that Wordpress is upgraded. The majority of plugins are created by normal people like you and I and as such don’t always get the attention they should. In time new plugins are always released to replace ones that fall by the wayside and wont work with the latest version of Wordpress.
If in doubt whether a plugin will work or not, then don’t upgrade the Wordpress version. It will continue to work with no problem.
Thanks for the heads up. Hope I am never in that situation. Must have very annoying. Did you already know how to do this or did you find out by trial.
Wordpress is a great blogging tool but can be tricky sometimes when you need to do routine maintenance.
Thanks for the post. I got stuck in maintenance mode and you are the sixth site that comes up on google. Luckily you are the only one with the answer. Thanks again.
Thanks, you just saved me a lot of time! :D
Thanks John. That tip was a real life-saver.
Mitch
I encountered this before as well, but once I was so tried, I left it in maintenance mode and went to have a Tea. When I came back, I refreshed the site to see that every was normal… no maintenance mode! I logged and saw in the admin panel a message saying “An automated WordPress update has failed to complete – please attempt the update again now.”
This was a after approximately 10 mins (very hot Tea!), and it seems WP has a script inside which manually deletes the “.maintenance” file.
Hope this helps. (Its ok to err with WP :-) )
This happened to me once before, immediately after I upgraded WordPress to 3.0. Like your experience, this error was so new, not much had been written about it. After about 10 minutes, it came to its senses! But today when it happened after trying to bulk upgrade some plugins, I’d forgotten the answer.
Glad you took time to write up a quick tutorial. Looks like the bulk upgrade function could use some work.
Thank you for saving me! I knew updating plugins through the Wordpress website rather than my FTP would be a disaster but that didn’t seem to stop me. You’ve saved me from having to pester my more web savvy friends :)
Thank you so MUCH! I just had a minor freak out when it happened to me with a clients website!! Do you mind if I repost this on my site?
But I can see the .maintenance file when using the cpanel filemanager.
John,
Thanks for hunting down this solution for the rest of us. It worked perfectly! You kept my period of panic down to a minimum. :-)
Be well, be free,
Lance
Thanks. This really helped me. I was busy updating my plugins and closed the window by mistake.
I’m just getting used to working on some WordPress themes and I have like 3 different installations going at once, which all needed to be upgraded. Most of the time they don’t work right away (blame the web host I guess) and one of them got stuck in maintenance. Your tip saved me, thanks!
Thanks for this tip – a real life saver!
Thanks man, You saved my life ;-)