Hi @deh1982,
It’s clear how frustrating this can be, especially after removing the plugin and still seeing the “Website in maintenance” banner showing up on just the shop page. Let’s work through this together and get things back to normal.
A good first step here is to check if the Coming Soon / Site Visibility option in WooCommerce is enabled, as this can sometimes display a maintenance style message even after other plugins have been removed.
Please head over to: WooCommerce > Settings > Site Visibility
From there, confirm that the site is set to Live and not in Coming Soon or Private mode. You can learn more about this here: https://woocommerce.com/document/configuring-woocommerce-settings/coming-soon-mode/.
If that setting looks correct and the issue persists, feel free to share an update and we can dig deeper with you.
Hello @lovingbro,
thank you for taking the time to help me. I checked the setting, site was live. Even so, placed it in coming soon and again live, however the problem persists. Checked also the page status and is in published, not private. So the problem remains. Thank you again for your support
Hi @deh1982,
Thanks for checking those settings and confirming the site visibility is already set to live. Since that ruled out WooCommerce, it does point back to the leftover maintenance file you mentioned.
You are on the right track with the maintenance.php drop-in. These files are typically located in the /wp-content/ directory, and in some cases there may also be a .maintenance file in the root of the WordPress installation.
As you do not currently have server access, the next step would be to ask the site owner or hosting provider to:
- Check
/wp-content/ for a maintenance.php file and remove it if present
- Check the root directory for a
.maintenance file and remove it
- Also review
/wp-content/mu-plugins/ for any leftover files from the LightStart plugin
Since this is showing only on the shop page, it may also be worth clearing any server level or page cache after those files are removed. You can learn more about drop-ins here: https://dev.to/mikevarenek/wordpress-drop-in-plugins-4db6 & https://woocommerce.com/document/use-ftp-to-manage-your-woocommerce-site/
If you are able to get a System Status Report after that, feel free to share it via https://pastebin.com or https://quickforget.com and we can take a closer look with you.
Hi @lovingbro,
again thank you for your support and will forward your recommendations to the server owner and will report back result.
In the meanwhile I though of a troubleshooting for the situation.
I updated the page title, not the slug, to include a message saying that the maintenance message is wrongly being showed and that products and process for shopping is working fine. since then, I already received an order. Also added info banners on all other relevant pages (home) warning that there is no issue only a message wrongly displayed. Maybe it helps others in the same situation to have less impact on the sales.
Your support is much appreciated.
Thank you
Hi @deh1982,
It’s great to see the proactive steps you’ve taken to reduce the impact on your sales while this is being sorted, that’s a smart approach and clearly helping already.
You’re absolutely on the right track with your troubleshooting, and your findings still strongly point to that leftover maintenance file being the root cause. Since WooCommerce settings have been ruled out, this is very likely something at the server level that needs to be cleaned up.
Once the server owner checks and removes any maintenance.php or .maintenance files, and clears any caching, that banner should disappear completely. Also worth double checking any mu-plugins folder for leftovers from LightStart, as those can sometimes persist quietly.
In the meantime, your workaround is solid and helpful for customers, so well done on keeping things running smoothly.
Please keep me posted once you hear back from the server owner, happy to continue digging with you if needed.
We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved.
If you have a few minutes, we’d love if you could leave us a review: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/woocommerce/reviews/
.
