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Sometimes when you’re making changes to your website, you’ll see a message similar to the following saying your site is undergoing scheduled maintenance.
WordPress can get stuck in maintenance mode during a scheduled WordPress update or when you’re updating a bunch of plugins or themes.
If WordPress is interrupted during this process, it doesn’t have the chance to take your site out of maintenance resulting in locking down your site and making it unavailable. WordPress automatically puts your site into maintenance mode during updates, so your visitors don’t see a broken version of your website. So how do you go about fixing the WordPress that is stuck in the maintenance mode screen?
How to Fix WordPress Stuck in Maintenance Mode
To solve this problem, we’ve put together a detailed guide to fix being stuck in WordPress maintenance mode fast, which you can read here.
Remove .maintenance file:
To take your WordPress site out of maintenance, the easiest method is to delete the .maintenance file. You’ll need to find your site’s root folder by connecting via SSH/SFTP and then navigating to /home/master/applications/APP_DIRECTORY/public_html/ and delete the file named as .maintenance
Deactivate plugins:
You could try renaming your plugins directory to plugins-backup
mv /home/master/applications/yourapp/public_html/wp-content/plugins /home/master/applications/yourapp/public_html/wp-content/plugins-backup
Try accessing your site. If it works, rename the directory to its original name. Then, try disabling every plugin on your site and re-enabling them until your site breaks again to pinpoint the problem plugin. You can first check which plugins are enabled with the command:
wp plugin list
You can then deactivate all of them with
wp plugin deactivate --all
To activate your plugins again, you can use
wp plugin activate --all
You can also activate them one by one.
wp plugin activate plugin-name
You can find more information about WP CLI here.
Edit wp-activate.php:
This can be found in your application web root just like the .maintenance file . You can edit a line of code in this file to resolve the issue if above two do not work. Access the file via SSH/SFTP. Open the file to edit it and find this line of code:
define ('WP_INSTALLING', true)Change true to false. The code will then look like this:
define ('WP_INSTALLING', false)Save and exit to and see if the issue is resolved.
That’s it! We hope this article was helpful. If you need any help, then feel free to search your query on Cloudways Support Center or contact us via chat (Need a Hand > Send us a Message). Alternatively, you can also create a support ticket.