Stuck in WordPress? Help! I can’t LOGIN?!

I’ve had clients & potential clients come to me because for some reason they couldn’t login their WordPress. They tried to reset the password using the whateveryourdomain.com/wp-login.php url but to no luck, have been stuck.

There are several reasons this could have happened which needed immediate attention. Try the solutions below before we go to the hard part:

• Cookies – Try clearing your browser & cache.
• Disable plugins – You need to have FTP access to do this or if you’re accessing your server via cPanel, you can use the File Manager feature in cPanel to get to your WordPress folders. From your root folder, go to wp-content > then go to plugins folder and rename your ” plugins” folder to “pluginsXX”. This will disable ALL your plugins on your WordPress site. Try logging in your website. Go back to FTP and rename back the “pluginsXX” folder to “plugins”. All the plugins are disabled at this time. You can verify that by go to your Dashboard > Plugins. Enable each plugins one by one and test which could be affecting or causing you trouble logging in.
• Theme – Sometimes, the theme you are using could be causing an error. Then in that case, you’ll need to replace your theme. Before you do that, you need to login first. But since you cannot login, you can deactivate the current active theme via FTP (just like how you deactivate the plugins folder).

Now to the next step. If all the steps above did not work, try resetting your password via your database. NOTE: You must have access to your PhPMyAdmin via your cPanel to do this.

• First, log in to your cPanel.
• Scroll down to Databases and under it, click  “phpMyAdmin”.

• Once you are on your phpmyadmin, click the database of your wordpress site on the left side.
• On the table, look for wp-users.
• Click on wp-users and look for user that you want to edit. Click “Edit” to reset that user’s password.

• When you click Edit, you’ll find the following: Column, Type, Function, Null and Value on the first part of the table.
• Under Column, look for user_pass. In the same row as user_pass, you’ll find under its value a code of different characters. Highlight that and delete it, then type the new password that you want to set. Before saving, under the same row, click the dropdown under Function and choose MD5.
• Once done, press “GO” to save. Take note of the new password you set for that user and log in to your WordPress.

Happy blogging!