Can’t login to WordPress admin: Reasons?

Have you ever wondered, why you are not able to login to my WordPress blog even though your password is not wrong or inactive?

In that case, it is usually because of a plugin. I will walk you through how to get back into your WordPress blog in the case you could not enter back in.

We can sort this out by deactivating all the plugins. Because one of them might be corrupted. And it may stop you from getting into your WordPress site.

We often get questions on this topic so we put together a detailed blog post on various reasons why you will get this error and solutions. I hope you find it useful.

I am using the WordPress defender plugin to give me extra security so I don’t actually have this login screen.

But you would be probably more familiar with this login screen. So, in your case, I would suggest just go ahead and follow this.

And for those who use WordPress Defender plugins for additional security, you will have a different screen to log in at a location that is secret for you to keep your blog a little bit more secure than the simple login to the WordPress back-end.

Anyways, this tutorial will work in both the cases.

Before we jump into the nitty-gritty of how to fix wp-admin not working issue, I just want to suggest if your site is selling eCommerce or has a huge customer or subscribers, I would probably recommend you use one of the defenders or a WordPress security plugin such as Wordfence Security for your own safety as site hacking and malware has become common these days.

I am not affiliated to any of those plugins which means I don’t get any commission promoting these plugins. However, I personally use Wordfence security on my blogs.

WordPress admin login panel or wp-admin not working –

How-to-fix-it procedure:

Let’s look into the step by step procedure of how to get back in your WordPress admin by deactivating plugins.

Step 1. Login to your cPanel

You need to go to your hosting provider. In my case it is Bluehost. Once you get onto your hosting website, click on login at the top right corner.

Once you login to your hosting provider. Click on Advanced -> File manager in case of Bluehost. For others, you might need to login to your cPanel or whatever type of panel your hosting provider may offer you.

Hopefully, once you are able to get into your hosting cPanel or back-end you should find under files, File Manager.

You should see something similar to this window after you clicked on File manager.

Step 2. Drill down to Plugins folder

You will see a number of files in here. You might want to be extra cautious in this step as changing anything here without knowing, what you are doing, might trigger unwanted results.

And what you want to locate is Public_html of the site you have the wp-admin not working issue with. This will have all the files of your site.

Also, depending on how many domains you have, you might have a number of domains listed in the above window. Just keep an eye on the domain you are working on.

Look for the plus button on the left side of Public_html file, once you find that you want to come down to wp-admin and then you want to find wp-content. Once you go to wp-content, you want to come up to Plugins on your right screen.

Step 3. Deactivate all the Plugins

Now on the right screen what you want to do is you want to rename the plugins. To rename the plugin, you can either right-click on plugins folder or you should have a tab up the top that says Rename. You can also follow the steps referred on the above image.

You can rename it to anything you’ll want that is entirely up to you but I would suggest you keep the word plugins in it. For example, you can put the word Deactivate right next to plugins as shown in the picture here.

Once you renamed your plugin, you can get back to your WordPress login window and try to login to your normal back-end WordPress.

You should be able to login to your WordPress. Once you make sure there is no issue with login anymore, go back to your cPanel window and find the plugins.deactivate folder again or whatever the word you added to rename your plugins.

This process would have deactivated all your plugins and then from there what you want to do is go back and change the name back to plugins, in other words, rename it back to plugins.

Step 3. Login to WordPress admin login & activate plugins one by one

Finally, we can go over and either log in to your WordPress defender back-end or you can log in to your WordPress back-end in case you don’t have that extra layer in your WordPress.

Once you do that we will just go ahead and do that now and you will be able to log in and you go over to your plugins and you’ll find all your plugins are deactivated or inactive.

Now we may have to find out which plugin was corrupted and stopped you from logging into your WordPress back-end. To do that you may want to go over to Plugins and simply activate the plugins one by one.

Please make sure you activate one at a time. After you activate each plugin by clicking the activate button right below it, and you will want to log out and try to log back into your WordPress back-end.

If you can log back into your WordPress, you can conclude that the activated plugin is not the corrupted one which prevented you from login.

Then activate the next plugin in line. Once you have activated the next plugin, simply log out of your screen by clicking the log out button on your right-hand top side.

Again you would simply go back to your WordPress back-end and log back in to see if you can log back in. If you can’t log back in then you’ll know it is the plugin that caused you trouble.

However if you can log back in, keep doing the process until you find out the corrupted plugin.

Usually, it would fix the wp-admin not working problem, in some rare cases, if it doesn’t fix the issue, please feel free to check out my wp-admin blank: How to fix post by clicking in the link at the first paragraph of this post.

Conclusion

I hope this step by step procedure was easy enough to follow. With that being said, If you do have any questions, please feel free to contact me at john@sprout-flowers.com or simply comment on the comment box here.

I suppose this solution helped you fix your wp-admin not working situation.

On a final note, I don’t want to leave you empty-handed, you might want to check out our most popular post on improving your website speed in just a minute: Ultimate guide that helped hundreds of websites from 30 seconds loading time to less than 3 second loading time.

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If you like this article or if you feel it helped a bit or did not help you at all to resolve your wp-admin not working issue, please let me know your feedback by commenting on the box below.

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If you like to see it on video, please check out this youtube video: