We all know that deactivating All plugins and reactivating them one by one is the best way to troubleshoot an error on your site, but what’s worse, sometimes you can’t even access your WordPress Admin Dashboard. That’s the easiest way to deactivate a particular or all plugins. If you have ever faced a Blue screen of death on your PC before, then you can easily understand exactly what I’m talking about.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to deactivate a particular or all your plugins when you are unable to Access your WordPress Admin Panel.
There are mainly two ways to Deactivate Particular or All Plugins, either using the FTP / File Manager or by using phpMyAdmin.
Table of Contents
Deactivate Particular or All Plugins:
Using the FTP / File Manager
Firstly, we are going to do it using the FTP and for that, you need to download (and install) an FTP client software on your computer. In this article, I’m going to use the software – File Zilla.
After installing the software on your computer, open that software and click on the Open Site Manager button on the top left-hand corner of the software window.
After that a Site Manager window will pop up, from there then you need to click on the New Site button. Now enter you Host, Change Logon type to Normal and then enter your Username & Password.
Click on the Connect button to access your files.
Further, you need to locate wp-content folder. Then inside the wp-content change name of the Plugins folder to whatever you want (in my case, I’m changing it to Plugins.deactivate).
If you look back to your Installed Plugins section of the WordPress Admin Panel, you’ll notice that all the plugins would disappear and some sort of “Plugin file does not exist” error would appear. This happened because we renamed the Plugins folder.
Now, to make the plugins visible back again in your Installed plugins section, rename Plugins.deactivate folder “Plugins”.
Consequently, in your Plugins section, you will notice it would appear that all the plugins got deactivated.
Finally, activate each plugin, one by one, to find out which one was causing the problem.
Using the File Manager from your Cpanel
If you don’t wish to use FTP for any reason, then you could also use the File Manager feature that came with your hosting. Simply, login to your Account’s Cpanel, Click on the File Manager and then follow the same steps as mentioned above.
Deactivate plugins Using the PhpMyAdmin
This is another method to deactivate all plugins. Usually, people use FTP for this kind of stuff and that’s a lot easier in my opinion.
To do this, first of all, you need to log back into your Cpanel (in case you logged out after trying the above method).
Then you need to click on the phpMyAdmin option under the Databases section.
This will open up a page in the new tab. Then you need to select your database (if not already selected). Upon selecting it, you’ll see the Database Tables.
As shown, all my tables in the database have wpvt_ as a prefix to the table name. Your tables may have a different prefix.
Next, you need to click on the wpvt_options table. Inside the wpvt_options table, you will see rows of different options. You need to find the option active_plugins and click the Edit link next to it. It may be on the next page so you can use the arrow button at the bottom of the page to navigate.
Later, in the Option_value field, fill the value – ‘a:0:{}‘ . And at the end, click on Go button to save the changes. This will deactivate all your WordPress Plugins. You could even use this method to deactivate a particular plugin but that’s a little bit tricky. I suggest you use the FTP method for deactivating a particular plugin.
You can easily Deactivate Particular or All Plugins by using any one of the methods mentioned above. Hope this will solve your problem and you’ll be able to log in to your WordPress now.
If you like this post then I think you might find our another post ‘How to install WordPress plugins‘ useful. Be sure to check it out.
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*Caution: Please make a proper backup of your website before performing any of the tasks mentioned above.