Every time you make updates to WordPress your website is put in maintenance mode. Although your site may not be available for a few moments, having it on maintenance mode is a safe way to go.
You can also enable maintenance mode manually when you are making changes to the site or fixing a bug. Enabling maintenance mode ensures that your customer information will remain safe and away from hackers, it lets your customers know that you are in control, and does not allow any transactions to take place while your site is vulnerable.
With all this said, sometimes your website may get stuck in maintenance mode. When your website is put into maintenance mode, WordPress creates a .maintenance file. This file displays the, “Temporarily offline” or “Scheduled Maintenance. Please Come Back Later,” types of messages. One of the most common reasons that your site may get stuck in maintenance mode is that the .maintenance file has not been deleted after the update has completed. Other reasons may be that too many updates are being done at the same time, plugins are not compatible with your WP version, or the plugin you have used to put your site in maintenance mode may have malfunctioned.
One of the best ways to assure that your website is being backed up, updated, and protected, is to use Managed WordPress Hosting such as 10Web, instead of shared or virtual private hosting. Though it does not guarantee that your site will not get stuck in maintenance mode, managed hosting guarantees site security, automatic updates, automatic backups of your WordPress website, and 24/7 customer care.
If your site is stuck in maintenance mode, to get it out of maintenance, you will need to locate the .maintenance file and simply delete it. This file is located in the root folder of WordPress. You can access the folder using an FTP client like FileZilla, or use a file manager, perhaps one provided to you by your hosting service. For the purposes of this “How To,” we will use FileZilla.
Download FileZilla on to your desktop to get started. Log into your 10Web dashboard, click on the website that is stuck on maintenance, and go to Hosting Services then Info. In order to log into FileZilla, you are going to need the information in the SFTP box.
Next, open FileZilla and connect to your SFTP server by pasting the information from your 10Web dashboard to the corresponding field of your FTP client or file manager. Because 10Web only supports SFTP, when using FileZilla, before pasting the values for the host, make sure to include sftp:// then the values for your host. Once you have filled in all the information, click on Quickconnect to connect.
After you have connected, navigate to your root folder. This will include your wp-admin, wp-content, and wp-includes. You will also find the .maintenance file here. Right click on it and choose Delete to remove the file.
Then go back to your website and reload the page. That’s it!