Disable a WordPress Plugin Without Access to Your Admin Area Print

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Written by Steve Burge on February 01, 2017 from ostraining.com | WordPress

 
Disable a WordPress Plugin Without Access to Your Admin Area

Normally, disabling a WordPress plugin is very simple and straightforward.

How easy? You can login to your admin area, click the "Plugins" tab and click "Deactivate" next to the plugin.

You can see an example below with Google Analytics.

Disable a WordPress plugin

However, sometimes a plugin can make things more complicated and cannot be easily disabled.

Some plugins can cause problems with logging into your admin area. That's exactly what happened to one of our members. They changed a setting inside a plugin and suddenly started getting these errors when trying to login.

So, what do you do if you can't login to your WordPress admin and disable a plugin?:

Disable the Plugin Files

The easiest is to disable the plugin's files.

  • Login to your site's files using the file manager provided by your webhosting company or using an FTP program such as Filezilla.
  • Browse to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder.

The akismet plugin folder in /wp-content/

  • Find the folder of the plugin you wish to disable.
  • Rename that folder as in the image below:
A renamed version of the akismet plugin folder

Try to login to your WordPress site. You should get a message telling you that the plugin has been disabled.

Now you can set up about solving the initial problem with the plugin, either by deleting the plugin entirely or by researching and fixing the initial error.


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