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

Are you trying to deactivate every plugin for WordPress, but you are not able to access WP-Admin?

Don’t worry! We will tell you how to deactivate all WordPress plugins when not able to log in to the WordPress admin area.

Why search the other ways to deactivate plugins?

While troubleshooting WordPress errors, you will be asked to deactivate all plugins and check for faulty ones. 

Generally, you can deactivate the plugins from your admin area easily. However, what will you do if you are unable to log in to the WordPress admin area to deactivate the plugins?

In this situation, You can use the following ways to deactivate all the plugins without logging in to the admin area. We will show you both the ways, and you can select the one you find easier.

Method 1. Deactivate All WordPress Plugins Using FTP

To deactivate the plugins, you can use the FTP client or the file manager option in your WordPress hosting c-panel.

To start, you have to connect to your website using an FTP client or File Manager in your hosting cPanel. After that, visit the /wp-content/ folder.

Now you will see a folder named plugins inside the wp-content folder. WordPress stores all plugins installed on your website inside this folder.

Now, right-click on the plugins folder and click Rename. Then, change the name of the plugins folder to anything like “plugins. deactivate”.

After that, It will deactivate all your plugins.

This is because WordPress search for the folder named plugins to load the plugin files. When it doesn’t find the folder, it automatically deactivates all the active plugins in your WordPress.

If the error was created by your plugins, then you should be able to access your WordPress admin area now.

If you go to your Plugins page inside your admin area, then you will notice the message stating all the plugins that have been deactivated, and you do not have any plugins available this time.

Don’t worry! They are safe, and you can restore them easily.

Go back to your FTP client in your hosting c-panel, visit the /wp-content/ folder again, and rename the “plugins. deactivate” folder back to plugins.

Now, return to the Plugins page from your admin area and activate the plugin one by one until you see the error again.

Now you will know the faulty plugin that was creating the issue. You can delete that plugin from your site using your FTP client and replace the plugin, and then you can report the issue to the plugin author.

Method 2. Deactivate All Plugins using phpMyAdmin

 The above method is much easier to deactivate the plugins; however, if you like to see another method, you can also use phpMyAdmin.

Note: Before doing anything, please keep a complete database backup. This will be helpful if anything goes wrong.

To start, log in to your web hosting cPanel dashboard.

Now, scroll down to the ‘Databases’ section and click on phpMyAdmin.

Then, You have to click on the wp_options table, and you will see rows of different options inside the wp_options table.

Find the ‘active_plugins’ option and then click on the ‘Edit’ Link beside it.

Next, you have to change the option_value field to a:0:{} and then click on the ‘Go’ tab to save your changes.

Now, you have deactivated all WordPress plugins using phpMyAdmin successfully.

If the error was created by your plugins, then you should be able to access your WordPress admin area now.

To Conclude-  If you are trying to deactivate all the plugins for WordPress, but you are not able to access WP-Admin, you don’t have to panic.

You can use the FTP Client or phpMyAdmin to deactivate all the plugins without logging in to the admin area. 

We hope that this post helped you deactivate all plugins in WordPress easily.