In short: When the connection between your WordPress site and Maintena goes quiet, we keep showing your last known data, clearly mark it as no longer current, and send you one calm alert. When the connection comes back, we send one all-clear. No pretending, no nagging.
What it is
Your site's WordPress Agent sends Maintena a steady stream of information: your plugins, themes, security hardening, health, and performance. Most of the time it just works, quietly, in the background.
But connections wobble. A plugin gets deactivated, an API key gets rotated, a site moves address, or the site's scheduled tasks simply stop firing for a while. When that happens, two things could go wrong: the dashboard could keep showing old data as if it were live, and you might never be told the link had gone quiet.
Connection Resilience is the layer that handles exactly that moment. It follows three simple rules:
- Degrade gracefully. A quiet site keeps its last synced data on screen. We never blank a panel or make it look like your site was never set up.
- Be honest about freshness. That last data is clearly labelled as stale wherever it appears, so nothing ever reads as current when it is not.
- Alert once per change. One clear message when the connection drops, one matching all-clear when it recovers. Never repeated nagging.
Importantly, this only affects the data that comes from the agent. Your Uptime, SSL and domain, speed and other checks that Maintena runs from its own servers keep working the whole time, because they do not rely on the agent at all.
How it works
The four connection states
Every badge, banner, and alert reads from one shared view of your connection, so they always agree. There are four states, based on how long it has been since your site last checked in.
| State | What it means | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Not connected yet | The agent has never checked in. | A friendly "waiting for first sync" message. Nothing is marked stale, because there is no data yet. |
| Connected | Reporting normally, checked in within the last 36 hours. | Everything shows as current. |
| Reporting delayed | Still linked, but quiet for more than 36 hours. | A gentle amber "as of X" label on your agent-fed panels. |
| Disconnected | Quiet for more than 48 hours, or the site reported that it was disconnecting. | A red "Disconnected" banner and per-section labels. One alert is sent. |
The gap between 36 and 48 hours is deliberate. Your site checks in roughly twice a day, so a short quiet spell shows a soft "reporting delayed" note for a while before Maintena ever declares the link down or emails you. This grace window means a slow day never triggers a false alarm.
What "stale" looks like on screen
When your site is delayed or disconnected, your last synced data stays fully visible. Every surface simply labels it for what it is:
- A banner at the top of the site page telling you the connection is quiet or down.
- A status dot in the dashboard header: green for connected, amber for delayed, red for disconnected, grey for not connected yet.
- "As of" labels on each agent-fed section (plugins, themes, security, health), so you can see at a glance how recent each panel is.
- Captions on the WordPress and PHP version cards noting the data may be out of date.
The rule behind all of it: a quiet site shows its last known data, but no part of the dashboard ever presents that data as fresh.
One alert when it drops, one when it recovers
If your site stays quiet for more than 48 hours, Maintena marks it disconnected and sends you a single notification: one in-app message and one email to your account's primary address. It fires exactly once, so a site that stays down for days does not keep emailing you.
When your site next checks in successfully, Maintena detects the recovery and sends one matching "reporting again" all-clear. The two are perfect mirrors: you are told when the link breaks, and told again when it heals, and nothing in between. See Notifications and email for how these alerts reach you.
A brand-new site connecting for the very first time is not treated as a "reconnection", so you never get a recovery alert for a site that was simply being set up for the first time.
Graceful behaviour on your WordPress site too
The agent that runs on your WordPress site is just as considerate on its side. When it has trouble reaching Maintena, it turns technical errors into plain English and, where the problem is temporary, quietly retries on its own.
| What happened | How the agent treats it |
|---|---|
| A temporary blip (server busy or rate-limited) | Treated as transient. The agent retries automatically after about 5, 15, then 30 minutes, so a brief outage needs no attention from you. |
| The dashboard address is wrong | Explained in plain language, with a prompt to check the Maintena URL points to your dashboard. |
| The API key was not accepted | Explained clearly, with a prompt to copy the key again and re-verify. |
If the problem is a genuine, lasting one (a wrong address or a rejected key), the agent locks its premium tabs and shows a specific "how to fix" note rather than displaying stale data as if it were live. A temporary blip never locks anything.
What you need to do
For almost everyone, the honest answer is: nothing. Connection Resilience runs automatically. The banners, the status dot, the freshness labels, and the alerts all appear on their own, and the recovery all-clear fires the moment your site checks back in.
If your site is ever marked disconnected, here is the short path back:
- Open the affected site in your dashboard and read the banner. It will point you to the most likely cause.
- Check that the WordPress Agent plugin is still active on your site.
- Confirm the Maintena URL and API key in the plugin's settings are correct and still match your account.
- Save and let the agent check in. Within a short while the banner clears and you get a "reporting again" all-clear.
If you are still stuck after that, your Success Manager is one message away, and the onboarding connect screen surfaces extra troubleshooting help if a first connection is taking longer than expected.
Good to know
- Disconnected is not the same as paused. A disconnected site is still being watched by all the checks Maintena runs from its own servers. It has simply gone quiet on the agent side. This is completely separate from a plan being parked, which is a billing matter.
- The rest of the dashboard keeps earning its keep. Uptime, SSL, domain, speed, and screenshots all keep running and reporting while an agent is disconnected. Only the agent-fed sections (plugins, themes, security, versions, and agent health) go stale.
- An alert from Maintena means something real changed. Because we alert once per change and always send the matching all-clear, we never cry wolf and never nag. Silence from us means all is well.
- Your data is never thrown away. A quiet connection never deletes anything. Your last synced data stays on screen, clearly labelled, until fresh data arrives.