Reset your WordPress password

If you’re having trouble logging into WordPress, you may want to try resetting your password to regain access to the backend. We’ll go over a few ways to accomplish this below.

Click the “Lost Your Password?” link

The easiest way to reset your password is to click the “Lost your password?” link from the login page and fill out the form on the next screen with either your username or email address:

Once that’s done and you’ve gotten a confirmation message, check your email for the password reset link. (Bear in mind it may take a moment, and always be sure to check all spam filters!)

When you click the password reset link, you’ll see a screen like this:
The form will come pre-filled with a suggested strong password. You can leave it as-is or change it, but as soon as you click the Reset Password button on this form, what’s in the New Password box will become your new WordPress password. You’ll then be returned to the login screen and prompted to enter your new login credentials.

Have another administrator change it for you

This is the “phone a friend” option! If a colleague or collaborator is able to log in, they can reset your password for you.

Have them navigate to the Users page, click “Edit” beneath your username and scroll to the Account Management section located at the bottom. Clicking the Generate Password button will automatically create a new strong password, or a custom password can be specified, as seen here:

Update the site’s database directly

But what if the password reset email never arrives or you’re the only site administrator? No worries! If you’re able to login to your Flywheel account, you can modify the database from the Flywheel dashboard and get yourself a fresh password in no time. This method is a bit more technical, but never fear, we’ll walk you through it step by step!

First, visit the Advanced tab of your site’s Flywheel dashboard. Over on the right sidebar, at the very bottom, you’ll see a card labeled “Database”. Go ahead and click Manage Database.

We’ll be making our change in the _users table of the database. This table is often named wp_users, but depending on your configuration it may have a different prefix. For databases with many tables, you can search for the _users table using the search field in the top right. Click on the table name to open it.

Find the username that you want to modify and click the pencil icon to the left to begin editing. This will take you to a new page where the magic happens!

In the Value column of the user_pass row, the encrypted version of your password will be displayed. Go ahead and enter your new password in this field. Then, select MD5 encryption from the Function dropdown. Only a password encrypted with MD5 will work at login, so don’t skip this step!

Click the green Save button to commit the changes.

You’re done! You can now return to your login page and try out your new password.

Need help?

If you have any questions our Happiness Engineers are here to help!