Photo Credit: Joe Zlomek

You login to your wordpress dashboard, all excited to write a new post and you see your blog has some updates it needs. So, maybe you update your plugins or a theme, and usually all goes well without a glitch. But sometimes, you do things to cause errors, or sometimes a plugin or theme or WordPress itself does not update perfectly on its own due to server time outs or other issues.

You now have a “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” page where your site should be, and you can’t even login into the WordPress dashboard.

Fortunately, while you are stuck in maintenance mode and locked out of the WordPress dashboard, it can be fixed relatively easily. Be sure you ALWAYS, ALWAYS have a back up of your site before proceeding!

If This Happened While Updating Themes and Plugins:

99.9% of the time, all you need to do is delete the plugin/theme from your server via FTP. You’ll be back into WordPress in no time. Do however make sure that you make a back up of the theme/plugin if you made customizations. Otherwise, you should be able to re-install it with a fresh/updated copy and be on your merry way. You may lose some of your settings, but unless you are using a very complex plugin or theme, this should get you back up to speed quickly.

If the theme or plugin you use stores information in your database, you may also need to visit phpadmin. This is usually done within your webhosting control panel, and it varies for all hosts as to where it is located. Once there, click on the database name, find the plugin or theme specific tables, and after making a backup, delete them as well to try a completely fresh install. Unfortunately, there are just too many plugins and too many variables for me to give you step by step instructions or guarantee this will work for all plugins – so if your attempts to simply delete and then reinstall a plugin do not work, check with the plugin/theme author for specific instructions.

If the thought of deleting a plugin or theme completely (even when you make a backup first) makes you nervous, you can first try disabling all plugins by using either phpadmin or ftp. More details at WordPress.org codex here

What to Do When WordPress Core Upgrade Fails

This greatly depends on the version you are upgrading to. Generally, the first step is to look for a file in your blog’s directory through ftp called .maintenance and delete it. This should hopefully remove the Maintenance warning and you can access the WordPress dashboard to continue the upgrade (you may be prompted by a message to click a button to upgrade the database first)

If that does not fix it, and you’ve already tried deactivating themes and plugins, you are probably going to have to restore your site from a database backup. There are a number of wordpress database backup and restore plugins you could use as an option, or you can do it the old fashioned method of creating a new database and reuploading your old files from before doing the upgrade.

How to Avoid This Problem

While there’s no sure fire way to avoid this, there are things you can do that will greatly minimize the possibilities of this happening later:

1. Upgrade with Each Release: Usually, if you upgrade say from version 1.2 to 3.4 of a plugin or theme or WordPress, it’s going to break and go haywire, regardless of the plugin or theme. It’s much better to upgrade from 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4 as new releases are made available – so always stay on top of updates!

2. Do not navigate away from the page or click on any other links until update is complete: I just recently made this mistake – I updated a plugin, and then before I got the updated confirmation page, I accidentally clicked on the comments link – therefore locking me out of WordPress. Just be patient

3. Use good webhosting: Some shared hosting plans just can’t handle automatic updating at all. This is especially of hosts that have outdated php versions or limit your php memory to only 20MB. See our list of best hosting for WordPress.

4. Always Have a Backup!: You can’t have enough backups of your website, especially before doing changes that can affect the database or files on your server.

Do you have any tips for someone who’s stuck in maintenance mode or has been locked out of WordPress? Share them in the comments below!