If you have been trying to do an update of a plugin and something goes wrong you can occasionally be locked out of your WordPress website with the message “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”.  WordPress puts this file in place whilst updating things so that no visitor can see a broken site.  As soon as the update is done WordPress normally removes it, but sometimes things can go a little wrong and it doesn’t get removed. Obviously this is a nightmare if you don’t know this simple fix…

All you have to do is log into your website with either some FTP software using your FTP settings (there is plenty of free software out there but Filezilla is the one I use). Alternatively, you can log into your web hosting control panel and delete the .maintenance file from your website.  Bingo you are back in!

Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash