WordPress is a great content management system with a lot of great features to it. However, like any other CMS on the market there are security risks with it. It’s fairly easy to stave off a lot of the issues by simply keeping everything up to date. When you are running these updates, you need to be sure to practice one skill that many of us are not too good at – patience.
I blogged about some basic security for WordPress a few weeks ago, but one thing I didn’t mention was the need to stay on that page until the updates are fully installed. When they are completed, you’ll see a line that says “All updates have been completed” and will have two links under that for “Return to Plugins/Themes page” and “Return to WordPress Updates page.” Once you see that confirmation you are OK to move on to another page.
The reason you need to be patient and remain on that updates page is that while the updates are running, the system will go into a maintenance mode. If you leave that updates page while the site is still in that maintenance mode, your site will become unavailable to all users and will only say “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” If you get this message you will likely need to contact your web developer and have them fix the issue by simply deleting the .maintenance file.
Most updates only take about 30 seconds to run. Simply be patient and wait until the page says “All updates have been completed” and then you can continue with any other work you needed to do in the system. Patience is a virtue in many facets of life, with WordPress updates, it can be the difference between your updates being installed properly and you site being locked in maintenance mode.
