Help! I’ve lost my WordPress password!

Some poor lost soul writes “I see that you use WordPress. I hope that you can help me! For some reason my admin password is not working! What should I do??”

Well, soul, as it happens I have had that very same problem myself!

First, you need to try the “I forgot my password” link; if it is enabled, it may just mail your password to you! But, if it’s not functioning, as was the case when I lost my admin password, here is what you can do.

First, register as a new user, and be sure to create a password. Remember that password!

Now, go into MySQL (which is the database which WordPress uses). Hopefully your ISP has provided phpMySQL for you, which is a front end web interface for MySQL. Find both your admin account record, and the new user account data. When you look in the password field for those records, you will see something which looks like this:

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This is what is known as a “hash”, and it represents an encrypted form of the password.

Erase the password hash for your admin account.

Now, very carefully copy the password hash for the new user you created, and paste it into the password space in your admin account, where you just erased the old password hash.

Now, log in to your WordPress admin account, using the new password which you just registered for the new user.

Voila!

Be sure to change your password, or that of the new user (or delete the new user).