WordPress stuck in maintenance mode: what to do

When WordPress updates a plugin, a theme or itself, the first thing it does is write a small file called .maintenance into the folder your site lives in. While that file exists, every visitor gets the maintenance message. When the update finishes, WordPress deletes the file. If the update is interrupted halfway, the file is never deleted, and the site stays locked.

Interrupted is the key word. On shared hosting the server gives a script about thirty seconds to run, and updating six plugins at once can take longer than that. A closed browser tab, a dropped connection, a hosting memory limit, or power going off mid-update will do the same thing.

• Open your hosting file manager. On Xneelo that is konsoleH, then the file manager for the domain. Any host has one, and an FTP program like FileZilla does the same job if you have the login details.
• Go to the folder that holds wp-config.php. That is the site’s root. It is often called public_html or www, and you will recognise it by the wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes folders beside it.
• Turn on hidden files. The file starts with a dot, so most file managers hide it by default. Look for a “show hidden files” option in the settings or the view menu.
• Delete .maintenance. Just that file. Nothing else in the folder.
• Reload the site. It should come straight back. Log in to the admin and check Dashboard, then Updates, to see whether the update you started actually finished.

WordPress ignores a maintenance file that is more than ten minutes old. So if the message survived an hour, something is serving you a saved copy of the page. Clear the cache in your caching plugin if you have one, then clear the cache at the hosting level (Xneelo and most hosts have a button for it), then reload in a private browser window. A CDN such as Cloudflare has its own cache, with its own purge button.

Sometimes the maintenance message goes and a white screen, or an error about a missing file, takes its place. That means the update itself finished halfway: a plugin folder was half written. In the file manager, open wp-content, then plugins, and find the plugin you were updating. Rename its folder (add “-old” to the name). WordPress will deactivate it and the site will load without it. Reinstall the plugin fresh from the admin and you are done. The same trick works for a theme, in wp-content, then themes, if you were updating a theme.

Also check the folder called wp-content, then upgrade. It should be empty. If it holds leftover files from the failed update, delete them.

• Update one thing at a time. Six plugins in one click is six chances to hit the thirty-second limit. One at a time takes longer and fails far less.
• Back up first, and test the backup. A backup you have never restored is a hope. Most hosting backups restore the whole account; a plugin backup restores the site. Know which one you have and try it once, on a quiet afternoon, before you need it.
• Do it at a quiet hour. If it goes wrong at seven on a Sunday morning, you have time. At eleven on a Monday you have customers looking at the message.
• Ask your host about limits. The PHP time limit and memory limit are settings. On most hosts they can be raised for a few rand, and it removes the main cause.

On the sites we build, the public site and the WordPress admin are two separate systems. Visitors get pre-built pages from a content network; editors work in WordPress on its own private address. So when an update goes wrong, the admin goes into maintenance mode and the public site does not notice. It keeps serving the last published version until the admin is fixed. We should be honest that this is one reason among several to build that way, and on its own it would not justify a rebuild. But if you have been through this twice, it is a reason.

If you would rather never do this yourself, updates and tested backups are the first two things on our care plan.