How to Deactivate All Plugins When Not Able to Access WP Admin

Last updated on September 25th, 2012 by

Editorial Staff

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Often times during troubleshooting, many sites will recommend deactivate all plugins and

activate them one by one. What’s worst is sometimes you get locked out of your WordPress

admin panel, so you can’t even deactivate the plugins in an easy way. If you have ever faced the

white screen of death, then you know exactly what we are talking about. In this article, we will

show you how to deactivate all WordPress plugins when not able to access wpadmin area.

There are two methods to disabling your plugins. One requires you to use FTP, and the other

requires you to use phpMyAdmin.

Deactivate All Plugins Using FTP

In this method, you will need to either use FTP, or your host’s file manager. Navigate to the

/wpcontent/ folder. You will see a folder called plugins. Rename the plugins folder to anything

that you like. In our example, we will call it “plugins.deactivate”. Once you do this, all of your

plugins will be deactivated.

Most of the time when you do this, you are usually locked out of your admin panel. If the issue

was with your plugins, you should be able login to your /wpadmin/. Once you do that, go back

to your /wpcontent/ directory and rename “plugins.deactivate” back to plugins. Now you can

activate one plugin at a time until your site breaks again. At which point, you will know exactly

which plugin caused the issue.

Deactivate all plugins using phpMyAdmin

The FTP method is definitely easier in our opinion, however you can also deactivate all plugins

using phpMyAdmin. If you don’t know how to get to phpMyAdmin, then we recommend using

How to Deactivate All Plugins When Not Able to
Access WPAdmin

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the FTP method above.

In your WordPress database, go in the wp_options table. Locate the option name

“active_plugins”. Now edit the value of that option and change it to this: a:0:{}

We hope that this article helps you deactivate all plugins in a fairly easy way.

ABOUT THE EDITORIAL STAFF

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed

Balkhi. Page maintained by

Syed Balkhi

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