WordPress Frustrations

Hey folks, I was struggling to come up with a topic when this one landed in my lap: WordPress login frustrations. It’s been over a week since I’ve been able to login to the site and play with any content and my computer seems to have forgotten my login information. Fortunately, there’s a fix.

I apologize in advance that this post won’t be interesting unless you have this specific problem. It is frustrating to remember all of the passwords that people are faced with today. We are also all aware that we aren’t supposed to use common words and numbers and that using the same password for everything is really bad news.

Here’s how the story usually goes:

You get here, only to discover, unlike the image above, that your information is blank and you can’t remember the super secret password you created. No big deal, you type in your email address as your username and click Lost your password?.

Much to your surprise you get this frightening error:

You’re still not worried because you can click on the Learn More link that leads you to a not so helpful second page where you then learn that you need to clear your cache of cookies or something like that.

As it turns out, you are crazy and you delete those cookies and clear the cache. With a triumphant smile you return back to your WordPress login (yourdomain.com/wp-admin.php) and get the same error. I repeat, the same error. If you’re like me you figure that deleting the cookies once is great, but surely not enough so let’s do it at least five more times.

It Still Doesn’t Work

Now you’re about to panic. You think that you’ll just go to your hosting site (bluehost.com) and go in the back way. Much to your chagrin you realize that you can’t really do that. How in the world are you supposed to login to your website??

I have a kind of straightforward answer. Luckily you’re almost there now that you’ve logged in to your hosting site’s admin tools. What you need to do from there is go to your cPanel. Once in the cPanel look for a little icon called phpMyAdmin. It might take a second to load but once it does, look for something like this:

wordpress frustrations

In there we are looking for something related to “Users”. For me, that was a directory called wp_woce_users. I have no idea what it means, but it had what I needed.

Password Changing

In that directory I had a column in the table titled “user_pass”. The row containing my login info underneath that heading had a bunch of gibberish text that didn’t look like any password I could create and remember. After a little bit of Internet searching I found that this is an encrypted view of your password in a format called “md5”. Md5 is an algorithm that creates 128-bit encrypted hash values. Pretty neat stuff. Because it’s a standard algorithm you can go to a md5 hash generator, like this one at MiracleSalad, and type in a new password that you want to use.

The generator spits out some new gibberish that you can then copy and paste into the “user_pass” column of your user directory. Click Go or Save at the bottom and you’re in!

Head back to the wp-admin.php login screen and enter your username and the new password and you’ll be back to normal with no problems. (This is not a guarantee!)

I realize that this isn’t as easy as an email password reset, but this trick should get you out of a bind when you are stuck and need to do some work. Hope it helps and be sure to subscribe and share this blog in your social media accounts. Your support is greatly appreciated as we get closer and closer to launching products!