You might be surprised to learn that the ‘Briefly Unavailable For Scheduled Maintenance. Check Back in a Minute.’ error is not really an error, it’s a notification. It appears when the core software, plugins, or themes of your site are being updated.

o fix the error, you will need to delete the .maintenance file from your site’s root folder. There are two main ways to access the root folder:

1. Using FTP and an FTP client, such as FileZilla.
2. Via cPanel File Manager, if your host offers cPanel.

ℹ️ We will show you both the methods. But first, a few housekeeping steps…

To begin, clear your browser cache. The browser often makes a copy of a website and presents users with the copied version (in other words, a cached version) to speed up the page loading process. So it’s possible that your site is back to normal and the error is just a cached version of the site.

Next, take a backup of your website. To remove the error, you will need to access the backend of your site and delete the maintenance file. If you ended up deleting the wrong file, it would lead to bigger problems. So take a backup. In case, something goes wrong, you can restore your site and try again.

If you already have a system in place where your site is being backed up daily, then proceed with the steps below. Otherwise, you will need to take a manual backup since you can’t access your wp-admin and can’t install a backup plugin. That said, manual backups and restorations are difficult, but your hosting provider might be able to help.