There’s nothing more annoying that forgetting your login password for a website. Thankfully, this should never be an issue if you own the site in question.

WordPress does have a lost your password feature however if you have forgotten what email address you used to sign up to your blog it isn’t very useful. So you need to take things into your own hands :)

This tutorial assumes that your WordPress blog is hosted on a hosting package which uses the web hosting control panel cPanel and the MySQL administration tool phpMyAdmin.

How to change your lost WordPress password

First thing you need to do is login into cPanel using the login details your host sent you. Then you want to look for the link to phpMyAdmin.

Find the link to phpMyAdmin

There are many different versions of cPanel and they all look slightly different. If phpMyAdmin isn’t listed on the home page then you need to click on the MySQL databases link.

Login into CPanel

If you scroll to the bottom of that page you should see a link to phpMyAdmin. Clicking on it will open phpMyAdmin in a new tab or window in your browser.

Locate the link to phpMyAdmin

When you log into phpMyAdmin you will see a list of databases down the left hand side. Simply choose the database which corresponds to the blog you are going to log into. If there are several databases listed there and you are not sure which is the correct one, please refer to the wp-config.php file.

Choose the correct database

Once you have selected the WordPress database, you will see a list of tables. Look for the one called wp_users and click on the browse icon to the right hand side.

Look for wp_users and click on the browse icon

The wp_users shows all users from your WordPress blog. The first entry is most likely admin, which is probably the username you want to change the password for. If it is not, scroll to the applicable username.

Then you need to click on the edit icon to the left hand side of the username.

Click on the edit button of the username you want the password for

Now you just need to edit the user_pass field with the password of your choice, making sure that you change the function to MD5 too. Then click on the go button and your password will be changed.

All you need to do now is go back to your login page and login.

I hope you have found this tutorial helpful. Should you be unsure about any steps please let me know in the comment area and I will do my best to help :)

Kevin