During the last few months I have had the pleasure of moving quite a few WordPress Websites from Godaddy hosting to WPEngine hosting. In doing so, I would sometimes encounter password issues where I would have to use what I call the WordPress phpMyAdmin Password Hack. The main culprit was the clients simply didn’t know or didn’t remember their WordPress Admin logins. The hack works as long as you have access to the hosting provider and the website’s phpMyAdmin console.
WPEngine Migrate Plugin
When moving sites over from Godaddy hosting to WPEngine hosting, WPEngine has a nifty plugin called WPEngine Migrate, that makes it super easy to move the entire website over.
The problem of course arrises when you can’t get access to the website you want to move over. As long as you know who is hosting the account and can get access to the server, you can use the WordPress phpMyAdmin Password Hack to view and change the Admin password in order to log in.
WordPress phpMyAdmin Password Hack
Each hosting provider might have slightly different ways to access the phpMyAdmin panel and you may need to contact the hosting provider for directions. Once you’ve gained access to phpMyadmin, all you need to do is look for the wp_users table.
The wp_users table contains all the user information for the website. Usually user_login id 1 is the admin user account as in the example above.
Now that you have access to the user account, you can write down the User Name from the user_login column and reset the User Password by clicking on the user_pass column and entering in a new password. For security reasons, WordPress uses what is known as MD5 Hash rather than Plain text to hide the actual password.
In order to adhere to WordPress guidelines you can create a MD5 Hash compliant password by using the following recommended tool: JavaScript MD5
Special Note: Thanks to Matt below in the comments: He wrote “to negate the need for the JavaScript MD5 tool, you could click Edit and the form presented allows you to set the field type to MD5. Just a little shortcut.”
The JavaScript MD5 tool will convert a plain text password into a MD5 Hash password. Copy both the plain text and MD5 Hash Password.
After using the tool, simply replace the existing user_pass password with the newly created MD5 Hash password.
Once the password has been updated, log into YourDomainNameURL/wp-admin (example https://hangtenseo.com/wp-admin) to access the Amin login screen and enter the User Name and Password (The Plain Text Password) to gain access to the WordPress Dashboard.
Handy article. I’ve had to do this a few times to recover a couple of development environments.
For info, to negate the need for the JavaScript MD5 tool, you could click Edit and the form presented allows you to set the field type to MD5. Just a little shortcut.
Hey Matt,
Thanks for the tip. I hadn’t had the need to mucked around with phpMyAdmin and really wrote the article as a reference for me and anyone else that might run into the problem. I am always running into issues where clients simply don’t have their account information handy when I need to perform some type of action on their website.
Cheers
Tom