Fixing log-in issues on your WordPress site

If you find you are unable to log into WordPress then here are some steps you can take to try and fix common issues related to logging in.

Log-in URL is not loading

If you find that your log-in URL isn’t loading when you navigate to www.mywebsite.com/wp-admin then an alternate URL you can use to try to access the dashboard is www.mywebsite.com/wp-login.php

If neither of the above work, then it may be that your website is using a custom admin URL. To determine what this is you will need to have a look at your websites files, specifically the wp-config.php file. Open this file in a text editor and look for the below line:

define('WP_ADMIN_DIR', 'customadminurl');

In the above example the admin url has been changed to 'customadminurl'. Now you know what the admin URL is you should be able to browse to this. For example, www.mywebsite.com/customadminurl

My password isn’t working and I can’t reset it

The first thing to try if your password isn’t working is to use the “Lost your password?” link at the bottom of the login page:

Click the link, and simply enter your WordPress username or email address and the site will send you an email link that will let you reset the password.

If you can’t remember your email address or username, or you find that the password reset email doesn’t come through then don’t worry you can reset the password manually within the sites database.

To do this you will need to get yourself logged into the database for the site via phpMyAdmin. If you are not sure how to get into phpMyAdmin here are some guides on how to do this:

Nimbus - https://support.nimbushosting.co.uk/support/solutions/articles/36000020533-accessing-a-database

Plesk - https://youraccount.nimbushosting.co.uk/knowledgebase/75/Create-and-Manage-a-Database.html

Once you are in phpMyAdmin, click on the database in the left hand pane. You will see a list of tables in the tree. All of the WordPress users are contained within the wp_users table so click on this.

You will then see a list of all the users for your WordPress site in the main window.

To change the password for a user, you need to enter a new password in the user_pass column. However, you cannot simply type your new password straight into this field as WordPress stores passwords as an MD5 hash of the original password so first we need generate a MD5 hash.

To generate your new password, you can use any online MD5 hash generators, such as - http://www.miraclesalad.com/webtools/md5.php

Enter your desired password into the MD5 hash generator and it should then generate you the hashed version of your password. It’s this that you want to paste into the user_pass field in the database.

Click on the field and paste the hashed password onto the box, then click anywhere on the page and it will save the new contents.

Now navigate to your sites WordPress login URL and you should be able to log in with the password you set.