{"id":3996,"date":"2026-06-23T15:19:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T14:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/knowledgebase\/disable-wordpress-plugins-in-the-database\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T14:00:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T13:00:28","slug":"disable-wordpress-plugins-in-the-database","status":"publish","type":"kb_article","link":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/knowledgebase\/disable-wordpress-plugins-in-the-database\/","title":{"rendered":"Disable WordPress Plugins in the Database"},"content":{"rendered":"

If a WordPress plugin has broken your site or stopped you accessing the dashboard, you can disable plugins from the database.<\/p>\n

This is useful when you cannot log in to WordPress to disable the plugin normally.<\/p>\n

Before editing the database, take a backup if possible.<\/p>\n

To disable plugins:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Log in to the 4UHosting client area at https:\/\/clients.4uhosting.co.uk.<\/li>\n
  2. Choose My Services<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  3. Find the hosting service and select Manage<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  4. Select Login to cPanel<\/strong> from the left side.<\/li>\n
  5. Open phpMyAdmin<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  6. Select the database used by the WordPress site.<\/li>\n
  7. Open the table ending in _options<\/code>.<\/li>\n
  8. Find the row named active_plugins<\/code>.<\/li>\n
  9. Edit the row and copy the existing option_value<\/code> into a text file before changing it.<\/li>\n
  10. Clear the option_value<\/code> field.<\/li>\n
  11. Save the change.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This disables the active plugins for the site. If the dashboard starts working again, log in to WordPress and re-enable plugins one at a time until you find the one causing the issue.<\/p>\n

    The table prefix may not always be wp_<\/code>, so the options table may have a different name, such as abc_options<\/code>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    If a WordPress plugin has broken your site or stopped you accessing the dashboard, you can disable plugins from the database. This is useful…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","kb_category":[37],"class_list":["post-3996","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\/3996","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\/3996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4045,"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_article\/3996\/revisions\/4045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"kb_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_category?post=3996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}