In this tutorial we can learn how to reset WordPress password.
Have you ever lost your WordPress admin password? Do you know how to reset the password in case you don’t have access to the WordPress dashboard? There is an option “Forgot Password” in the WordPress admin login screen. You can simply reset it by clicking on the link and following the instructions. Suppose someone had intruded into your WordPress installation and reset the password and changed the email address so that the password resetting email will be going to some other email address. What can you do in this situation? Have you ever heard an option that allows for you to reset the password from the database? In this article, we are going to see how to reset the WordPress admin password from the database.
As you may know, WordPress installed websites are database driven websites. You need at least one database to complete the WordPress installation on your website. We are going to see how can we take advantage of this feature by resetting the WordPress admin password and getting the control back to your hand. However, it is not recommended for a beginner level WordPress admin. Please contact us so that we can assist you by restoring the website from an older backup or with any other solution. If you are familiar with cPanel and can manage the PHPMyAdmin or you have enough technical knowledge to work with Linux, MySQL commands, you can go ahead with the following procedures to reset the WordPress password.
Reset WordPress password with PHPMyAdmin
There are many ways to access the database. PHPMyAdmin is a tool that will help you to access the databases of your website. The PHPMyAdmin can be opened from the cPanel Interface. Our Standard Web Hosting offers you cPanel as the control panel and you can open the PHPMyAdmin from cPanel. With PHPMyAdmin, you can do this task without having any technical knowledge.
We are going to update the table wp-users with the values required to reset the WordPress Admin password.
Steps to reset the password in PHPMyAdmin
1) Login to your cPanel interface.
2) Click on the option ‘PHPMyAdmin’ from the ‘Databases’ category.
3) Enter into the WordPress database. The WordPress database will be usually starting with “wp”. However, this is not always true. A user can change this while the WordPress installation is configured. The databases will be listed in the left panel. You can select the database from there.
4) Enter into the table wp_users.
Once you have entered into the WordPress database, you can go to the tables inside the database. The tables will be listed under the database name as subtrees. Usually the table prefix will be wp_. You need to locate the wp_users table and enter into it.
5) Edit with your WordPress username.
6) In the user_pass field, set the function to MD5 and enter the new password in the Value field.
7) Click on the button “Go”
You have finished the steps to reset the WordPress admin password.
Reset WordPress password with Command Line Interface.
This is an alternative method to do the same thing, but with the command line interface. To do this you need to have an SSH access to the server. You can get the details of how to access the server via SSH with Putty here: https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/using-putty-to-ssh-to-server/.
1) Enter into MySQL with the following command.
$ mysql -u username -p
Password:
Now you need to enter the password so that you can connect to the MySQL server.
2) Now please enter the below command.
$ UPDATE `wp_users` SET `user_pass`= MD5(‘yourpassword’) WHERE `user_login`=’yourusername’;
Please remember to replace the “yourusername” and “yourpassword” with the correct username and new password respectively.
Now you can login to the WordPress admin dashboard with the username and new password.
If you need any further assistance please contact our support department.