I’ve had to do this for my wife and her mom both, so I thought I would share this with anyone who needs to reset a WordPress password. I personally love WordPress. You can build any type of site with it, not just a blog. If you have created a WordPress site but haven’t visited the admin dashboard in a while, you may have forgotten your password. I thought that WordPress would email you a lost password, but maybe they didn’t put in their correct email address. It could have also been the installation script they used through cPanel. Whichever the case, they couldn’t get into their dashboard and they needed their passwords sent to them.
There’s a very easy way to reset that password through SQL. Whether you are using phpmyadmin or some other SQL client to access your databases, you’ll want to use the following SQL statement to reset your password:
1 | UPDATE `wp_users` SET `user_pass`=md5('password1') WHERE `ID`=1; |
You can change password1 to whatever you want. I’m amazed that WordPress passwords aren’t stored with more encryption than a simple MD5 hash. It’s secure enough, don’t get me wrong. I’m just surprised that the WordPress developers didn’t opt for more.
Oh well, I hope that helps someone in a pinch.