If you lose, misplace or simply forget your (for example) 16 digit random character password, there are a few ways to recover it. The most obvious is to reset it through the WordPress login page with an email or of course, ask us and we can reset it for you. But if you are managing your WordPress site yourself, and maybe you don’t have access to your email (maybe you forgot that password too!) sometimes the simple methods can still lead to problems recovering your precious password and accessing the back end of your website.
There is thankfully a full proof way of resetting the password for your account. You’ll need cPanel access and beyond that phpMyAdmin access. It can be a little daunting if you haven’t done it before, so be careful – and backup your site (files and database) first!
How to Reset a WordPress Password From PhpMyAdmin
First you need to login to the cPanel dashboard of your WordPress hosting account. Next, you need to click on the phpMyAdmin icon under the database section.
This will launch the phpMyAdmin app where you need to select your WordPress database.
You will now see the list of tables in your WordPress database. Now you need to look for the ‘{table-prefix}_users’ table in this list and click on the ‘Browse’ link next to it.
Note: Table names in your WordPress database may have a different table prefix than the one we are showing in our screenshot.
You will now see the rows in your WordPress users table. Go ahead and click on the edit button next to the username where you want to change the password.
PhpMyAdmin will show you a form with all the user information fields.
You will need to delete the value in the user_pass field and replace it with your new password. Under the function column, select MD5 from the drop down menu and click on the Go button.
Your password will be encrypted using the MD5 hash and then it will be stored in the database.
Congratulations! You have successfully changed your WordPress password using phpMyAdmin.
Now some of you may be wondering why did we select the MD5 hash to encrypt the password.
In the older version, WordPress used MD5 hash to encrypt passwords. Since WordPress 2.5, it started using stronger encryption technologies. However, WordPress still recognizes MD5 to provide backward compatibility.
As soon as you login using a password string stored as a MD5 hash, WordPress recognizes it and changes it using the newer encryption algorithms.
