{"id":3937,"date":"2025-11-12T09:16:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T09:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/knowledgebase\/change-a-wordpress-user-password-in-the-database\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T14:00:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T13:00:52","slug":"change-a-wordpress-user-password-in-the-database","status":"publish","type":"kb_article","link":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/knowledgebase\/change-a-wordpress-user-password-in-the-database\/","title":{"rendered":"Change a WordPress User Password in the Database"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you cannot reset a WordPress password by email and cannot access the WordPress dashboard, you can change the password directly in the database.<\/p>\n<p>This should only be used as a recovery method. Editing the database incorrectly can break the site, so take a database backup first.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Open phpMyAdmin from your hosting control panel.<\/li>\n<li>Select the database used by your WordPress site.<\/li>\n<li>Open the table ending in <code>_users<\/code>.<\/li>\n<li>Find the user account you want to update.<\/li>\n<li>Select <strong>Edit<\/strong> for that user.<\/li>\n<li>Find the <code>user_pass<\/code> field.<\/li>\n<li>Delete the existing value.<\/li>\n<li>Enter the new password in plain text.<\/li>\n<li>In the <strong>Function<\/strong> column for <code>user_pass<\/code>, choose <code>MD5<\/code>.<\/li>\n<li>Save the change.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>You should now be able to log in to WordPress with the new password.<\/p>\n<p>WordPress does not store passwords as plain text. The <code>MD5<\/code> option is used here as a recovery method. After you log in, WordPress should update the stored password hash to its normal format.<\/p>\n<p>The database table prefix may not be <code>wp_<\/code>. If your site uses a custom table prefix, look for the table that ends in <code>_users<\/code>.<\/p>\n<p>After logging in, go to your WordPress profile and set a strong new password. If the password was changed because of a security issue, review the site&#8217;s administrator users as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you cannot reset a WordPress password by email and cannot access the WordPress dashboard, you can change the password directly in the database.&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","kb_category":[37],"class_list":["post-3937","kb_article","type-kb_article","status-publish","hentry","kb_category-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_article\/3937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/kb_article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_article\/3937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4089,"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_article\/3937\/revisions\/4089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"kb_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_category?post=3937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}