How to Fix – WordPress: Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute

WordPress update stuck in maintenance mode

In some cases the message “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute” doesn’t disappear after you update your WordPress, despite the update being successful. Even worse – you are locked out of admin because both admin and your site display this message.

How to fix the WordPress maintenance mode problem? The solution is simple. Use your FTP program to connect to your server and delete the .maintenance file from your server (it is in the WordPress root directory, same as .htaccess). In most cases this will fix it. If the update did not finish then loginto admin and try to reinstall WordPress updates.

Stylesheets / CSS not or partially loading, site partially loaded

Every now and then I encounter a problem where several sites that I visit fail to displays CSS. It looks something like this  (Gizmodo website):

css not loading, website partialy loaded gizmodo

The problem appears when something goes wrong while you are deleting browser cache,cookies etc. In my case it usually happens when I use CCleaner (free tool for cleaning your Windows PC) and I accidentally open Firefox (or other browser) while CCleaner is deleting the cache.  Websites start to look like above screenshot and refreshing the page doesn’t help.

The solution is to refresh the page with CTRL + F5, which forces browser to redownload the entire site from internet and not from local cache. This solves problem only for that site so what I do is close all browsers and run CCleaner again.