“Help, I can’t log in to WordPress!” is one of the most common WordPress hosting support requests. Being locked out of WordPress is worrying, to say the least, but there’s no need to panic because you’re in the right place.
There are several reasons you might end up locked out of WordPress, and they are straightforward to resolve with cPanel & WHM. In this article, we look at four of the most common login problems and show you how to fix them. They are:
Logging in when you have lost your password.
Fixing the WordPress white screen of death.
Repairing a database error that is stopping you from logging in.
Regaining admin privileges when your user has lost them.
Fixing a Lost or Forgotten WordPress Password
You’ve lost your WordPress password, and that means you can’t log in. In most cases, the built-in password reset tool is all you need. However, if you can’t access the email account that WordPress sends the reset link to, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and edit the MySQL database.
Find your username in the user_login column, and click Edit at the beginning of that row. The hashed password is in the column next to your user’s login name, but don’t try to change it on this screen.
On the next screen, find the user_pass row and type a new password in the value column. In the function column, select MD5 from the dropdown menu. WordPress doesn’t store plaintext passwords. It runs the password through a hashing algorithm and stores the hash value. We have to replicate that by selecting the MD5 function.
Fixing The WordPress White Screen of Death in cPanel
Giving your user a new password is easy in cPanel, but what if the login interface doesn’t load at all? If you’re faced with a blank screen, you’re dealing with the White Screen of Death.
There are several possible causes, but the most likely is poorly written or conflicting plugins, so the first step is to disable all plugins.
How to Disable WordPress Plugins without Logging In
The strategy is to rename the folder that contains the plugin files. WordPress won’t be able to find the plugins, so they won’t be loaded.Open the cPanel File Manager from the Files section of the main page.
Navigate to your site’s directory, which is probably in the root or a subdirectory of public_html.
Navigate into the wp-content directory and click on the plugins folder.
Select Rename from the toolbar. Choose a name like “quarantined_plugins.”
Now try to log in. If you’re successful, rename the directory back to “plugins.” If WordPress continues to work, disable all the plugins in the WordPress interface and re-enable them one-by-one until the login error re-occurs. At this point, you have discovered the culprit.
If this method doesn’t work, you may want to consider restoring your site from a backup taken before the incident.
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