Logging In to WordPress and Resetting Your Admin Password Print

Where to log in

Your WordPress admin area is at yourdomain.tld/wp-admin. If you are already logged in it opens straight to the dashboard, otherwise it shows the login screen. A handful of sites use yourdomain.tld/wp-login.php, which is the same thing, and some security setups deliberately move the login to a custom address to hide it from attackers, if yours has been moved and you do not know where to, we can tell you.

This login is your WordPress account, and it is separate from everything else: not your cPanel login, not your client portal, not your email. Our article on understanding your logins explains how these fit together, the short version is that WordPress has its own front door with its own key.

Resetting your password the normal way

If you know your username or the email address on your WordPress account:

1. On the login screen, click Lost your password?
2. Enter your username or account email address.
3. WordPress emails you a reset link. Click it and set a new password.

This works whenever WordPress can send email and you can receive it, which is most of the time. When it does not work, it is usually one of the two situations below.

When the reset email never arrives

This is the most common WordPress login problem, and the cause is almost always that the site cannot send email rather than anything wrong with your password. Many WordPress sites are not set up to send mail reliably, so the reset message is generated but never delivered.

Do not keep requesting it, that just fills a queue that is going nowhere. Instead, reset the password a different way, below, which does not depend on email at all.

Resetting without email, through your hosting

Because you control the hosting, you can reset a WordPress password directly, no reset email required. WordPress stores its users in your site's database, and there are two routes in:

• The easier route, if WordPress was installed through a cPanel tool such as WP Toolkit: that tool can often reset the admin password or log you straight in without one. Find it in cPanel via the search box, as described in our cPanel tour.
• The direct route, through the database in phpMyAdmin: locate the users table, edit your user, and set a new password, making sure to tell phpMyAdmin to encrypt it with MD5 rather than saving it as plain text. This works reliably but is unforgiving of mistakes, and editing the database directly is not for everyone.

If either of those makes you uneasy, do not force it. Open a support ticket and we will reset it for you, verifying your identity first as our account security articles describe. A five-minute ticket beats an hour spent worrying you will break something.

If you can log in but keep getting thrown out

A different problem with a different cause. If logging in appears to work but bounces you straight back to the login screen, the usual culprit is the site's address settings or stale cookies. Clear your browser cookies for the site and try once more, and if it persists, tell us, since it can also point at a plugin conflict or, occasionally, a compromise, which our article on hacked WordPress sites covers.

Good to know

The reason a hosting-level reset always works when the email route fails is worth holding on to: your WordPress password lives in your own database on your own hosting, so having control of the hosting means never being permanently locked out of the site. That is also precisely why WordPress admin access is worth protecting with a strong, unique password, as our security articles urge for every login, anyone who reaches your wp-admin can reach everything the site can do.