How to Reset a WordPress Admin Password

This guide will explain how to reset your password for your WordPress admin account using both the reset password email link and manually through phpMyAdmin.

Quick Steps: Password Reset Link

Step 1: Go to your website’s wp-admin URL (yoursite/wp-admin)
Step 2: Click the link “Lost your password?”
Step 3: Enter your username or email and click “Get New Password”

Quick Steps: phpMyAdmin

Step 1: Login to your cPanel account and locate “phpMyAdmin”
Step 2: Locate the database of your website and expand tables.
Step 3: Select the table called “wp_users” , select the user on the right and click edit.
Step 4: Type your password and select “MD5” from the drop down.

There may be times when you’ve misplaced or forgotten your password to log into your WordPress based website and need to reset that password. To do this, there’s two easy steps to change your password. The first step is going to be by using the password reset link.

Password Reset Link:

When going to your website’s wp-admin login URL (yoursite/wp-admin) you’ll see a small link towards the bottom titled “Lost your password?”.

wordpress-password-link

Click the link shown in the image above titled “Lost your password?” & you’ll be taken to the password reset option, shown below.

wordpress-pasword-reset-option

Enter your username or email address into the field displayed above & click “Get New Password”.

If you submit the reset form but do not get an email containing instructions and/or a new password, your website may not be properly sending emails using a valid email address but instead sending as the “user account”. We have a KB article explaining why this happens: emails are sent from user@servername.com and not an actual email address

If you are not receiving the email containing the reset link or password, you can follow the steps below to reset your password through the WordPress database.

Manual Password Reset Using phpMyAdmin:

First, you’ll need to log into your cPanel hosting account and locate the “pypMyAdmin” icon & click to enter the phpMyAdmin utility.

phpmyadmin-database-utility

Once you have entered the phpMyAdmin database utility, you will need to locate the database that your WordPress website is using. To find this information, you can check your wp-config.php file found in the installation directory of your WordPress site.

As shown below, you’ll click once on your database & it’ll automatically expand the related tables.

phpmyadmin-show-database

Now that you’ve expanded the tables for your database, you’ll want to click on the table found on the left side called “wp_users”. Once you click on “wp_users” you’ll see the table entries on the right side which contain your WordPress users.

pypmyadmin-wordpress-users

Once you locate the user on the right column, you’ll want to click on “Edit” as shown below outlined in the color red.

pypmyadmin-wordpress-user-edit

After clicking “edit” you will now be able to directly edit the entry for the selected user account.

pypmyadmin-wordpress-password-edit

Choose “MD5” from the dropdown for the entry of “varchar(64)” Or “varchar255” and type your new password into the box directly to the right of the drop down. Be sure to use a secure password using uppercase, lowercase, numbers & special characters in your password. Once you’ve filled these in & selected “MD5” from the drop down, click “Go” located at the bottom right side.

You should now be able to log into your WordPress wp-admin using the newly modified password you have set by using phpMyAdmin to reset the password.

Should you have any problems, feel free to contact our support department & we’d be happy to assist in getting you access to your WordPress wp-admin.

If the steps above listed in this article do not resolve your issue, please feel free to open a support ticket and we’d be happy to take a look.

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