Sometimes you might encounter the issue with accessing your WordPress admin area simply because you forgot the password and/or your WordPress doesn’t send password reset link.
In this case you might need to hack your way in, in this guide we are showing you how to gain back the WP admin access using phpMyAdmin or any other MySQL admin tool at your disposal.
How to change WordPress admin password in phpMyAdmin
Basically, every host has some work of phpMyAdmin installed on their servers. If you are using cPanel, just log into your cPanel account and navigate to Mysql section. See the image below.
Once you click on the phpMyAdmin link, it will load in the new tab. You will see all your databases listed here. Find the right database that is used by your WordPress website and click to open it.
You will see the database tables listed in the row. Here just look for the database table wp_users and click to open it. If you are using WordPress with custom database prefix, your users table could be named wp123_users or similar.
Once you open up the wp_users database table for editing, you will see the registered user accounts in the list. Find the admin user account or the account that you want to change password for and click on the edit.
This will open up the admin user database details like username, password, email, etc. Scroll to the record entitled user_pass. You will see encoded password in the password field. Type you new password in plain text here, select the MD5 from the dropdown menu and clicik on the Go button.
This will encrypt the password in MD5 format and now just get back to your WP admin page and log in using your new password.
Conclusion
You can follow this guide no matter if you are using cPanel or not. Basically, every host offers some form of phpMyAdmin access, if it’s not located in your hosting panel, try reaching your host and ask them to provide the access for it.
