Reset or Change WordPress password manually via phpMyAdmin

Andy Williams from Facebook asked me about how he can reset WordPress passwords via phpMyAdmin so that he cccan Incase if you have forgotten your WordPress password and wants to change it manually by setting the password directly in database via phpMyAdmin interface then its pretty much easy to do so.

The screenshots in this article are of my local development environment.

• Access phpMyAdmin interface from your hosting account.
• Select the database which holds your WordPress data and head over to the wp_users table by clicking on browse button.

• Find the row corresponding to the user whose password you want to change and click Edit (pencil icon).
• Change the user_pass field by selecting MD5 as Function and entering the new password in Value.

• Click Go and your new password is saved.

Similarly you can change passwords for multiple users. In case you need a automatic solution for a large number of users, then you can hire me for an hour to create a script which can mail all the WordPress users a reset password link email. Do you have any questions? I would love to answer them. 🙂

P.S. – I am aware of the fact that WordPress uses a different hashing algorithm (phpass) but when loggin in for the first time when you have a MD5 of your password in the database will set the correct string in the database by itself. A guy did create a tool to set the phpass string but that would also vary as per your salts, so I think its very much fine to stick with this approach till it works.