Recover a Lost WordPress Password

By Randy Jensen | Mar 30, 2009

WordPress LogoRecently I had a client contact me and tell me they lost their WordPress password and couldn’t get into their account. I guess they had the wrong email in there and couldn’t use the ‘Lost Password’ feature either. Luckily, there’s a ‘not too difficult’ method for resetting your password (or more than likely your favorite client’s password).

I’m going to be using cPanel and PHPMyAdmin for this, but you should be able to do it with whatever system your host is using to allow you to manage your DB’s.

  1. Login to cPanel and look for phpMyAdmin
    WordPress Password Recovery
  2. Look for your database to the blog you forgot the password to on the left hand side
    WordPress Password Recovery
  3. Look for the ‘wp_users’ table and click the ‘Browse’ button
    WordPress Password Recovery
  4. Find your username/user ID and click the edit button next to it
    WordPress Password Recovery
  5. Look for the ‘user_pass’ field and change the function to MD5. Then simply type your new password in the text area. When you’re done, click the Go/Save button
    WordPress Password Recovery
  6. Finally, go and try to login to the blog using the username you chose to edit and the new password you just entered. What’s that? you forgot the password? Go back to step 1 and go to jail.

That’s it! There are a couple other ways out there to get your WP password back, including one where you upload a file to your server that basically opens WP up so you can get in and change the password. This method is by far the best way to do it, however.


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  • Duncan
    I just tried this method and then attempted to login. I received the following error message. Note: I had recently upgraded from a very old and stale version of WordPress:

    atal error: Call to undefined function: is_site_admin() in /home3/blogname/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sem-google-analytics.php on line 110

    Any idea what might be causing this, and how I might be able to recover the situation?
  • Snakes
    Thanks for this description, worked perfectly!
  • Hey snakes,

    Glad it worked for you!
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