If you face this typical WordPress “Screen of Death” with the message “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”, don’t panic because it is very easy to solve. In most cases is temporary but occasionally goes permanent.
First of all if you have some spare time, just wait a little bit because in most of the cases it goes away by itself after five to ten minutes.
When updating plugins and/or themes or even the whore WordPress CMS it is possible that something goes wrong during the process what leads to this error/information message becoming permanent. During those updates a .maintenance file is created to generate this message and if the process is not finished because of an error occurance, the file might stay on the web hosting server forever until you remove it.
To get rid of that just do the following:
- Connect to your web hosting server throught SFTP, FTP or FTPS (SFTP is recommended)
- Go to the
public_htmlfolder (can also bewwworhtdocs,public_shtmlfolder) - Delete the file
.maintenance - Refresh your website and it should be back to normal
However if you been forced to delete the file it is important to investigate why it was not automatically removed. Start by updating the plugins/themes one by one to see if anhy of them ir the source of the problem
If you have any questions, just comment and I will do my best to help you.
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