Changing the Log in Details within the Database

Video Transcript

In this class, I’m going to walk you through the steps in changing a password and other login details from within the site’s database.

Now why would you even want to do this? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but probably the main one would be if for some reason you as the administrator gets locked out or if you simply forget your login details or you need to change the username of somebody else that’s a member of your site, which you cannot do from within the WordPress admin area, the way to do that or make these other changes is from within the database of that WordPress site.

To do all this, you’ve got to log into your cPanel control panel. And over here under the Modules section, look for the one that says Databases. And within that section, click on the link for phpMyAdmin. And if you have multiple WordPress sites, as I do here, you’re going to need to know which one you even want to change. So I already know that it’s this one here. If you don’t know, you want to go to the File Manager. And then in the root directory of that WordPress site, you’re looking for the wp-config.php file. Select that. And up here in the top, click on View. And you’re looking for the database name right here. So that tells me which one I’m looking for in the phpMyAdmin. Close this. Come back here. Click over here on the left.

That’s going to display all the tables for that particular database. And the one we’re looking for is users. Go ahead and click on the link here on the left. And that’s going to display all the users for that particular site. And of course in this example, it’s just one. Click on Edit over here on the left. And that’s going to display all the tables for that particular user. The one we’re mainly interested in is right here, user pass, that’s the one for password. See all this gobbledygook?

That’s an encrypted version of what the original password is. What we want to do, if we want to change the password, is simply highlight all that, put in the new password. And you want to stick with the same criteria in creating a strong password. We want to make it close to impossible to guess, upper and lowercase letters, numbers, special characters, and so on. But we’re not quite done. Once we enter the password we want here and yea, copy and paste this on a text document somewhere. But over here, just to the left, in this drop-down, hit that.

Come down and look for the one that says MD5. As you can see, there is a bunch of them in here. Don’t worry about what all those are. Just look for the MD5, select it. And then come down to the lower right and click on Go. Before I do that, I want to mention that if you wanted to change the username of that particular person, you cannot do that in most cases from within the admin area of your WordPress site. But you can do that here in the database. Right here is the user login. Just change it right here. There’s nothing you have to worry about over here on the left. Just highlight the username here, make the change. Say you’ve got a membership site and that software requires that the username be the email address during signup and there’s no way to change that from within the admin area, now you know that you can change that. So if you’ve got a customer that doesn’t want their email address to be used as a username, now you know how to change it. Just make the adjustment here. Come down and click on Go. As you can see, the password here was already encrypted.

So hopefully, you wrote that down somewhere. If not, you know how to change it.

And that’s going to bring us to the end of this video on altering login details for your site from within the site’s database. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.