Are you locked out of your WordPress dashboard area? If so keep watching I'll
show you two quick ways you can use to fix that issue and get back up and
running quickly. Since you'll be making changes to your website make sure you
have a backup copy of your website first. The first method uses an FTP client and
we think it's the easiest of the two methods to use, now FTP is a file
transfer protocol and that allows you to access files and folders on your website
through your hosting provider. This is a way that you can access your website
without going through your WordPress dashboard this comes in handy if a
plugin goes awry or if a bit of code breaks your site you have another way to
access your website to clean it up and get it back up and running quickly.
There are several FTP clients that you can use, for this video I'll be using
FileZilla so you want to head over to Filezilla-project.org and download
the one appropriate for your machine. Once you install FileZilla this is what
it will look like. The next thing we want to do is go ahead and add the
credentials to access our website so let's head over to file, site manager
from here we can add a new site. Under host you want to add your website name
your FTP credentials should have come to you from your hosting provider via an
e-mail or you can also email your hosting provider and ask them for the
credentials if you don't know them already. Under protocol we'll choose FTP.
The encryption we want to use explicit FTP over TLS if available. That means
that it is encrypting the data that is coming from our computer to our website
so we want to keep that. For a login type we want to use normal. Next go ahead and
add the credentials for your user for the FTP. Finally we can rename this
and that helps if you have multiple sites. Now I'm going to click connect, once it
connects you'll see a successful dialogue up here you'll also see all of
your folders coming over over here. What we need to do now is deactivate all of the
plugins from our website so that we can find the one that's causing the issue
from here I want to go into my wp-content folder and I want to change
the folder name four plugins. To do that
let's go ahead and right click on the plugins folder, click rename and you can
rename it whatever you want. I'll choose deactivate, now that we've changed the
folder name let's go back to our WordPress dashboard and see if we can
access it. Once we go to our plugins area you get notifications that the plugins
have been deactivated because they can't find them and that's okay. Since we can
access our website and we can go to the plugins area we know that there was a
problem with one of the plugins now we need to troubleshoot which one. Let's
head back over to our FTP client again we want to rename the plugins folder
back to what it was so I'll change this name right click rename change it back
to just plugins and now when we go to the plugins area of our dashboard we'll
see all of the plugins come back over in deactivated state so all of them are
deactivated right now and what you could do right now is click activate on each
one until you find the one that's causing the problem.
Now the FTP method is definitely the easiest method however if you want to
you can also do this by going to your PHPMyAdmin area and deactivating the
plugins from the database. To do that you'll want to log in to your cPanel
from your hosting account, find PHPmyadmin
from here we're looking for the options table it usually has the WP prefix but
some hosting providers change that for security measures as you see here mine
is isk_options. We're looking for the active plugins field I'm
scrolling down and you might have to click on the next page so scroll down
and click on the right arrow like this to find it. Now that I found it
let's click edit so we can edit this field and we want to create this value
in the database. Once you've changed that value go ahead and click go at the
bottom to make those changes take effect on the database.
Once that's done all your plugins will be deactivated again and you can
troubleshoot which plugin is causing the issue so those are two ways that you
can deactivate all of your plugins when you're not able to access your WordPress
admin area. Make sure you subscribe to our channel where we share more
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