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Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance Check Back in a Minute is a common WordPress error that is very frustrating and sometimes it does not go away as its message suggests. If you’ve faced this problem and you waited for more than 2-3 minutes and it still persists, it won’t go away on its own, and you should take some actions to fix it. Yet, it is still a common error, and it is very easy to fix it and we will share a few ways to do it in the following article.
You Can Also Read Google Search Console Common Errors & Fixes
Why and when does this error occur?
Whenever you are updating your WordPress core, theme, or plugins, WordPress puts itself into a “maintenance mode” to ensure that the updating process will not be interrupted. Yet, sometimes this temporary maintenance mode keeps occurring because of some crash, slow server responses, script timeouts, and memory issues.
Fix Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance
As we already mentioned, while an update is running either for your theme or any of your plugins, the WordPress puts itself into a maintenance mode. To do that, WordPress creates a temporary maintenance file, that can be found in the main WordPress directory. If everything runs successfully and the process is completed, this file is automatically deleted after the process ends. So if you keep seeing this error for longer, you can manually delete the file from the installation directory.
Log into your FTP account and look for the maintenance file, once you find it right-click on it and hit the delete button. Then refresh and your website should be running again.
Fix Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance Without FTP
If you don’t have access to your FTP account, or you are not really familiar with it, you can try another method to fix your issue.
You should first access your WordPress directory with a cPanel or with the file manager provided by your hosting provider, log into your WordPress directory, find the maintenance file, and delete it manually.
How To Fix It With Wp-Activate
If any of the methods that we mentioned above did not work for you, you can give this method a try.
First, you will need to download your wp-activate.php file to your computer. (this file is located in your WordPress directory).
Then check the screenshot and see the 9th line – where it says:
“define (‘WP_INSTALLING’, true);” .
Change the ‘true‘ to ‘false‘ save the file and exit.
Then upload your file into your WordPress files, replace the old one, refresh and try again. In most cases, it will fix your issue.
Our Conclusion
The “Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance. Check back in a minute.” is a common WordPress error and it should not really put you in panic. It is yet one of the easiest errors to fix in WordPress and if it doesn’t go away on its own, any of the methods that we shared above should work in 99% of the cases.