WordPress Recovery: Sitewide Maintenance Notice and a wp-admin Plugin-Conflict Diagnosis

This job arrived as an emergency. The client had lost access to wp-admin and suspected the worst. By the time we picked it up he had regained access himself, and no scan or cleanup proved necessary — the reported problem turned out to be something else entirely. What he actually needed was to take one business offline cleanly, and later, to get a second site's admin working again.

Part one: a sitewide closure notice

The client wanted a clear "This Website Is No Longer In Operation" notice shown across one of his sites. After an initial mix-up over which domain was meant, we applied the notice, reverted it, and set it up correctly on traderevolution.com.au, restoring the other site to its normal live state.

Getting it to actually show took more than switching a plugin on. Two competing maintenance plugins were fighting over the same output, and a SiteGround server-level cache was still serving the old homepage on the main address. We resolved the plugin conflict and cleared the host cache so the notice appeared consistently sitewide.

Part two: a blank wp-admin

Later, on the same engagement, the client's other site — labourrevolution.com.au — began returning a blank white page at wp-admin, locking him out of his own dashboard. Working through the host rather than the dashboard he could not reach, we traced it to an outdated WP Rocket build that was incompatible with the server's PHP version.

We took a full backup first, then disabled the plugin, which immediately restored admin access. Rather than leave the site without caching, we removed WP Rocket entirely and enabled SiteGround Speed Optimizer in its place. We also flagged eleven pending plugin updates for the client's attention — the same class of drift that caused the outage.

Outcome

The client confirmed the notice live, released both sets of milestones and left a 5/5 review, closing with "thanks so much for all your help."