I received this email from a client recently after uploading a modified theme i had completed work on:
How do I get back into the admin to activate the theme? When I try to login I get this message:
“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”
Here’s how i removed that message and got the site working again.
In the root directory of the installation i found a maintenance file named .maintenance which contained this code:
<?php $upgrading = time(); ?>Here’s where i found the file in the installations root directory:
The file is added by WordPress when auto updating and the code executes maintenance mode displaying a page with the message
“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”
The Fix
Simply remove the .maintenance file from the root directory of your WordPress installation and your site will become accessible again.
When working on the site, i noticed the site was loading very slowly to the point it timed out when installing a small child theme and plugin. The reason for this is maybe the site is hosted on a very cheap shared hosting which may have reached its limit of allowed resources. Maybe because all the sites on that server where auto updating at the same time.
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