After seeing the article title you are maybe asking yourself: Why somebody writes something like that? Everything what I need to recover my Wordpress password is to click one link and let the script to send new password to my email. If you are thinking in this way I am pretty sure you are one of the lucky webmasters who never needed to solve this issue.
If you didn't write new posts for your blog for longer time or if you checked the Remember Me field you didn't need to enter your username and password for some time. In this case there is a big chance that you forgot them. If you got an error when you are signing in follow these steps:
- Determine if you are signing in with wrong username or password (or both). Read the error message displayed above the login box. It will tell either ERROR: Incorrect password or ERROR: Invalid username. If you get Invalid username error it is possible that both username and password are wrong. If you get the Incorrect password error the username is valid and you can use it in the form described in the next steps.
- Click the Lost your password link in the bottom. A form with 2 fields will be displayed.
- Using this form you can generate new password and let it to send to your email which you have entered when you installed the Wordpress script. The common problem is that you usually don't remember either username or email which have you used by the weblog installation. Without these information is not possible to recover lost password.
- Now you will need to determine which email address and what username have you used. Log in your web hosting control panel (hopefully you didn't forget your username or password :o) and click the MySQL database icon (or PHPmyAdmin depending on the control panel provided by your web hosting company). Select the database where are your weblog data stored and log in the PHPmyAdmin. In the left menu search for table named wp_users. Click the link and in the next step click Browse link in the top. Look for the row with ID 1. In this row you will find your username and email (yes, your password is stored there too but it is encoded so there is no chance to read it).
- Now go back to Wordpress log in page and click the Lost your password link again. Fill in your username and email and submit the form. Now check your email and click the link inside to confirm you really asked for password reset.
- Wait for a moment and check your email again. You will get another message with your new password.
Many PHP scripts require to know both username and email used by installation in case to reset your password. If you will need to recover password from another script working in this way you can also try to follow the steps described above. To avoid unplesant situation with lost password you can try to save them using software like Roboform or Password manager integrated in your browser.
By Bedrich Omacka
Bedrich Omacka is now employed by a webhosting firm offering SPF protection web hosting.
http://www.webhostingtoplist.com