If you lost the username and its password to log on WordPress dashboard, you can use your email address to get them back. This is probably the easiest way to recover WordPress admin username and password. Sometimes however you may forgot the registered email address or what’s worse you lost the access to the email address. In this guide guide, we will show you how to retrieve WordPress password from its MySQL database.
How to recover WordPress password from database?
Each WordPress installation requires a MySQL database. phpMyAdmin is the database management tool recommended by most WordPress hosting service providers. If you have the cPanel to manage the sites, log on your cPanel, scroll down to the Databases section, you should be able to find and access phpMyAdmin from there.
Backup WordPress database before any changes
Note that if you are not familiar with phpMyAdmin, we highly recommend you to create backups of your MySQL databases before you make any changes to it using phpMyAdmin. You can backup WordPress database in phpMyAdmin or download WordPress database backups from cPanel to your computer.
Recover WordPress password from database using phpMyAdmin
Once you launched the phpMyAdmin, you will see a list of all your databases in the left pane. Click to expand all the tables of your WordPress database. If you have set prefix for the database tables before, you will see the prefix in all the tables. By default wp_users is the table that you can manage all your WordPress users in database. Choose wp_users, all WordPress users should be listed on the right. You can see the user login, user pass, user nickname, user email, and many other columns for each WordPress user if you have multiple users. The user_pass is a long list of numbers and letters, you can’t use it to log on your WordPress dashboard as the password in database is encrypted.
Retrieve WordPress password through email
In the WordPress user table, you can find the current email address. If you still have access to this email, you can go to retrieve WordPress password with it. So nothing need to change in the database.
If you do not have access to this email, you can simply replace it with a new one. Then go to recover WordPress password through email.
To change WordPress admin email address, click the Edit button before the admin user. Find the user_email row, type a new valid email address in the value column, hit Go button at the bottom right to update the email for your WordPress admin user.
Reset WordPress administrator password
Find the user_pass row, choose MD5 from the drop-down menu in the Function column, input the new password in the Value box, click Go button to update the password for the WordPress admin user. You can then go to log in WordPress dashboard using the new password you have just reset.
