Lost your WordPress Password?

This happens all the time. Honestly, it used to happen to me, but then I got One Password from Agilebites.com https://agilebits.com/onepassword This allows me to save all my passwords securely on my computer.  I was a mess before getting this and use to try to come up with clever passwords and I used to come up with a secret questions that only I knew the answer for and then I would store the secret question in an excel spreadsheet with hints…  What a drag!  One Password has been awesome and I would recommend it to anyone who has lots of online accounts to manage.  In my opinion it is worth every penny of the 49.99 price tag.

However, that really isn’t the point of this post.  So, back to losing your WordPress login, if the ‘Lost your password’ link is enabled on your login page and you know the email address you used, you can enter it and WordPress will send you an email to reset your password.

If you have lost both password and email or the ‘lost password’ option isn’t available, you may need to login into your hosting account and access your site’s phpMyAdmin

  1. Log into phpMyAdmin.
  2. Select the database of your WordPress site.
  3. You should see the tables appear in the left hand column.  You’re looking for the ‘wp_users’ table.  If you don’t see it, look for one with ‘xx_users’ in case you changed the table prefix.
  4. Click the “Browser” link or icon.
  5. Find the username in the right-hand content area and look for the Edit link or icon (it’s usually a pencil icon).
  6. You’ll see a list of your user information pop up.  Delete all of the text in the “user_pass” area.  It will be encrypted so it won’t show you what the password is.  Enter the password you want to change it to.  Then in the drop down menu next to it select “MD5″ option.  This encrypts the password and is how WordPress stores all passwords.
  7. Click “Go” on the bottom right and you should be all set.
  8. Go back to your site’s login page and verify your new password does indeed work.

If this all seems way to complicated, contact your web guru and have him or her do it for you.