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Disable a plugin without access to WordPress admin Print

  • WordPress, PlugIns
  • 0

Sometimes a WordPress plugin can cause your website to break and even lock you out of your own website.  Disabling a plugin is usually quite straightforward but what happens when you no longer have access to your WordPress dashboard.

You have two choices. If you know the plugin that is causing the problem you can disable it via File Manager. If you don't know what the cause is, you can disable all plugins and then once you have logged back in to WordPress you can enable them one at a time to troubleshoot the issue.

Disabling a WordPress Plugin with cPanel File Manager

  • Log in to your cPanel account
  • Click on File Manager
  • Double click on the www folder and then the wp-content/plugins folders
  • Find the folder for the plugin and rename it.  A good practice would be to change the name by adding -disabled to the folder name
  • The plugin should now be disabled and you can log in to WordPress as normal

Disable all WordPress Plugins with cPanel

  • Log in to your cPanel account
  • Click on phpMyAdmin (You'll find it under Databases)
  • Click on the wp_options node in the database tree on the left hand side.
  • Look through the data for the option_name active_plugins.
  • Click on the pencil icon to edit the data
  • The very first characters will be a: followed by a number
  • Change the number to a zero so it now changes from something like a:15:{ to  a:0:{
  • Make sure you don't change anything else in the text box
  • Click on Go to save the changes
  • All of the plugins for your website will now be disabled

An alternative option is to delete the entire active_plugins value as WordPress will re-create it for you once you re-activate a plugin.


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