Do you want to change the password of WordPress users?
Is one of the users of your website asking you to do so?
Have you forgotten it yourself (yes, we all have the typical abandoned website that we want to work on again after 6 months)?
Is it an admin password and you don’t even remember the registration email?
Don’t worry, in this post we present you several methods you can do to change a WordPress password, even if you don’t have access to the registration email.
Here we go!
Contents
From WordPress dashboard
The easiest way to change a WordPress desktop password is from the WordPress desktop itself. If you are an administrator you can change your password as well as any other user’s password.
This case is only possible when we are logged into our website.
The steps to follow are simple.
Go to Users > Profile and scroll down to the Account Management section. There you can change the password for your profile.
If you are an administrator, you can change passwords for other users and administrators.
In this case you should click on All users, choose the user you want to change the password for and scroll again down to the Account Management section.
From the user’s email address
If you remember your email (or the user in particular remembers it), you can request a new password from the WordPress login page.
From the database (phpMyAdmin)
Have you forgotten your username, email or is it a website that has been passed on to you and neither you nor your client have access to it? Well, it is also possible to fix it, but you will need access to the web hosting where WordPress is installed.
This method is a bit more advanced, but if you follow the steps below it will be a piece of cake.
First of all, log in to the hosting where the website is running and go to the PhpMyAdmin database manager.
Once inside the database of the website you are interested in, you should look for the table where the different users are stored, which is called wp-users. Click on it.
Second, once inside the table you will see a list of all the users that are registered on the site in question.
You will see the usernames, their password (encrypted, that is not the password as such), first and last name, email and the name to display in WordPress.
In our example there is only 1 registered user.
Third, click on the user in question and from all the data you will see you will have to modify one cell: the user_pass cell.
In the user_pass cell choose the MD5 function and type the password you want (choose a secure password for your WordPress) in the box in the “Value” column.
If you would like to change the user you can type whatever you want in the user_login cell.
When you are done, scroll down to the bottom and click “Save”.
The password will be encrypted and the changes will be done.
You can test access by entering the data you have chosen.
Extra ball: reset brute force plugin
Sometimes you may face the following scenario:
- A user does not remember her/his password
- The website has a anti brute-force system and the user runs out of attempts and is blocked for the next 72 hours
- The user needs to access the site inmediatly to work on it
In the next post we tell you how to reset WordPress access attempts blocked by an anti-brute-force plugin, so you can log in instantly.
