After installing a plugin on your WordPress site and that plugin was not compatible with the version of WordPress that was installed, or there was some kind of issues with the plugin installation you may find that your site may not load, or you may not be able to access the WordPress Admin Dashboard.
This article provides instructions on manually disabling a plugin that may be causing issues with your site loading so you are able to log in to the Admin Dashboard and remove it.
Disable Through FTP (These steps are written for FileZilla but will be the same for any FTP client you choose to use)
- Log in to your site via FTP. If you are unsure of how to connect to your site via FTP please see our How to Use FTP article.
- Navigate to httpdocs > wp-content > plugins.
- Find the folder for the plugin that you need to disable.
- Right click on the plugin folder and select Rename.
- Rename the plugin folder to disabled.[pluginname].
Renaming the plugin folder will stop your WordPress installation from seeing the plugin, and disable it within the site, allowing you to load your site and log in to the Admin Dashboard.
Disable through phpMyAdmin (Advanced Users)
- Follow the steps in our How to Access phpMyAdmin article to connect to your MySQL Database.
- Expand your WordPress database.
- In the list of tables, click on the options table. Depending on the method of installation this table may have a randomly generated prefix in front of it.
- Click the Show all button to display all rows in the options table.
- In the list of table rows find the active_plugins row.
- Click the Edit button.
- Delete the content related to the module you want to disable (all content after the semi-colon up to the quotes).
- Click Go to save your changes.
The plugin that was causing issues on your site will now be disabled and allow you to access the Admin Dashboard of your site.
Article ID: 2094, Created: December 18, 2014 at 3:19 PM, Modified: April 6, 2015 at 3:54 PM