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Tutorial: Manually Take WordPress Out of Maintenance Mode

John P.

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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…

Comments

  1. Hi John,

    What can I do if I can’t find the .maintenance file? My website isn’t stuck in the maintenance mode, but if you browse around the site, you will get that page a couple of times. I check My FTP (with the hidden dot files check) and there is no .maintenance file to be found anywhere. I can even see the .htaccess file but no .maintenance file. Do you know what else may be causing this issue? Would really appreciate your help.

    Thanks

  3. This saved me much time and I am sure a headache, thanks so much for posting this!

  5. Thanx for sharing worked well for me – however now I need to figure out which plugin failed an update and screwed the site :(

  6. Hi there,

    I recently put a new theme on my site and then upgraded WordPress. It is now stuck with OUR SITE IS CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION PLEASE CHECK BACK SOON. I have seen to delete the .maintenance file via FTP but I have looked through every file and this maintenance file is not there. I have forced show hidden files too. I have deleted the theme and deactivated all the plugins but its still in Maintenance Mode. Can anybody help please?

  7. after login my site appears but when I click the ´control panel´ on the upper left sidebar to edit my site, there is only a blank – nothing shows. There is no ´maintenance. file in the ftp root, and this occurred after updating the version. So can anyone give a suggestion on how to reactivate the edit mode again.

  11. hello i was upgrading WordPress 3.4 to 3.5 in maintenance mode, but accidently i close my browser! when i reopen the wordpress it say this error(Fatal error: Call to undefined function force_ssl_admin() in /home/eurdmaur/public_html/wp-login.php on line 15).

    Can anybody help me out of this situation?
    Please…

  12. Thanks, this got me out of a pickle.

    I wasn’t even upgrading anything, just adding products through WooCommerce when suddenly! Maintenance.

    Any idea what causes it?

  14. Thank you for the tip. Failed plugin update put me into maintenance mode. Panic was mercifully short after seeing your post. Sometimes WordPress takes us a little out of our comfort zone. When are they going to include a big, fat Undo Button?!

  15. I was waiting for the hosting to answer when I found this answer to my problem! Thank you so much for posting about getting stuck in maintenance. Saved lots of time and stress.

  18. 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!

  20. 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

  22. 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?

  23. 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 :)

  24. 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.

  25. 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 :-) )

  28. 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.

  30. 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.

  31. 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.

  34. 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

  35. 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.