Reclaiming your lost WordPress password
What do you do if you’re like me and have a lot of WordPress blogs and forget the admin password? I’m not saying it’s something common, but if you always use programs/browsers that remember the passwords you type someday you may accidentally clear the cache you get into the situation where you have to retype the account password (which, for security reasons, can be hard to remember).
Easy you say: use the retrieve password by email function provided by WordPress! This should always work, but there are some situations when it doesn’t: your email account cannot be accessed for some reason, you changed the username and don’t remember which is it, you gaved admin rights to a guest blogger and it changed your password (that’s a really silly thing to do).
So, let’s see the “magic” method I’ve thought of. First you have to have access to your SQL database, with admin rights. Now let’s see the steps:
- Create another WordPress blog (on a subdomain of the original blog, on shared hosting account or even on your local PC)
- Create an account and set a password
- Login to that blog’s SQL database (you can use PHP MyAdmin)
- Browse the wp_users table and look for the user_pass field corresponding to the admin user. You won’t recognize the password you typed as it’s encrypted.
- Copy the string
- Login to the SQL database (usually your host provides access to PHP MyAdmin) of the blog you’ve lost the password
- Browse the wp_users table and change the user_pass original field to the copied value at Step 5 (at this step you’ll also see the username/usernames accounts of the blog)
- Go back to your blog and login with the username to which you’ve changed the password (use the clead password, not the encrypted string).
The wizard above can also be applied to any website that uses MySQL to store users and passwords, provided that you duplicate the platform (so that the passwords are encrypted the same way).
If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact me.
