Reset Wordpress Administrator Password

Posted on May 25th, 2008 by Carlos

I just happened to check one of my personal installation of WordPress (2.5) for an experimental project this afternoon and when I’ve hit the wp-admin my original administrator password for strange reasons wasn’t working anymore, I’ve tried the good old “Lost Password?” link, got the e-mail confirmation with the new key but only to find out that the key was incorrect. No matter how many times I will reset the password and get the email in my inbox, the same incorrect key was sent.

After spending sometime on the database and Googling for help I came across this handy php file called emergency.php, It allows you to change your WordPress administrator password and it sends off an e-mail to the blog administrator telling him that the password has changed.

The file works on WordPress 2.0, 2.2.x and 2.3.x but I just did it in a 2.5 installation and worked like a charm.
You need to upload the emergency.php file to the root of your WordPress installation via ftp and then type your blog url followed by /emergency.php where you will see the following screen:

WordPress Administrator Password Reset

After reseting the password to what you want, you will receive an e-mail (if you are the administrator) with the new password, after checking that everything works DELETE the file from the server and save it for other emergency, this worked perfectly and saved me many hours of researching and hedeaches.

More detailed instructions on the author’s blog