What To Do When You Are Locked Out of WordPress Admin (wp-admin)

Are you having trouble logging into your WordPress admin area?

This can be caused by a lot of different reasons, which makes it tricky for beginners to troubleshoot.

In this article, we will show you what to do when you are locked out of WordPress admin (wp-admin) so you can regain access to your site.

Why Are You Locked Out of Your Own WordPress Site?

We often hear from users who are locked out of the WordPress admin area. This is frustrating and can bring your productivity to a standstill. You can’t write posts, respond to comments, or do any work on your WordPress website.

If you’re having trouble logging in to someone else’s site, then you should contact the site owner or admin to let them know. They can explain why you don’t have access, or work with you to solve the problem.

If you are the site owner, then you can follow our troubleshooting steps below.

There are few reasons why you could be locked out of WordPress admin, so let’s take a look at each of them one by one. Hopefully, through this process of elimination, you will be able to figure out the solution to your problem.

You can also refer to our WordPress troubleshooting guide to find out what’s causing the issue and how to fix it. You might also find a solution in our list of the 50 most common WordPress errors and how to fix them.

With that being said, let’s have a look at some steps you can take when you are locked out of WordPress admin. You can use the links below to quickly navigate to the error message you see.

• Error Establishing Database Connection
• 500 Internal Server Error
• 404 ‘Not Found’ Error
• 403 Forbidden Error
• 401 Unauthorized Error
• Limited Logins
• White Screen of Death
• Incorrect Password Issue
• Problems with Plugins
• Lost Admin Privileges
• Hacked WordPress Site
• Login Page Refreshing and Redirecting
• ‘This Has Been Disabled’ Error
• ‘Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance’ Error
• PHP Syntax Errors

Error Establishing Database Connection

Are you seeing the ‘Error establishing database connection’ warning on every page of your site? This message is shown for various reasons, such as a corrupt database or issues with your web hosting server.

If you’re seeing this error when trying to log in, then please refer to our guide on how to fix the error establishing a database connection in WordPress.

500 Internal Server Error

Another WordPress error that a beginner may come across is “Internal Server Error”, or sometimes “500 Internal Server Error”. This error is displayed when there is something wrong but the server is unable to identify where the problem is.

If you see this message when trying to log in to WordPress, then follow the steps in our guide on how to fix the 500 internal server error in WordPress.

404 ‘Not Found’ Error

Sometimes users make a mistake when changing the WordPress address and site address in their WordPress settings. The next time they try to log in to their admin area, they get the error ‘Error 404 – Not Found’.

If this is happening to you, then check our guide on how to change your WordPress site URLs. You won’t be able to use Method 1 because you can’t log in, but the other methods should get you out of trouble.

Note: If you can log in to your site but see the 404 error when viewing one of your posts, then you have a different problem. You can learn how to fix the issue in our guide on how to fix WordPress posts returning 404 error.

403 Forbidden Error

Some users report seeing the “HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden” error when trying to log in to wp-admin. This error can be caused by incorrect file permissions, poorly coded security plugins, or your server configuration.

If you’re seeing this error, then our guide on how to fix the 403 Forbidden Error in WordPress will help you track down and fix the problem.

401 Unauthorized Error

Another message you can see when you’re locked out of your WordPress site is the 401 error. This error is sometimes accompanied by a message ‘Access is denied due to invalid credentials’ or ‘Authorization required’.

You can see this message if you’ve password-protected your WordPress admin folder. It can also be caused by a WordPress security plugin or security measures taken by your hosting company.

Please refer to our guide on how to fix the 401 Error in WordPress to learn six solutions that will help you regain access to your website.

Limited Logins

By default, WordPress allows users to enter passwords as many times as they want. Hackers may try to exploit this by using scripts that enter different combinations until your website cracks.

To prevent this, we recommend that you limit the number of failed login attempts per user. However, this might mean that you find yourself locked out of your own website when you enter the wrong password too many times.

If you’re in that situation, then you should follow the steps in our guide on how to unblock Limit Login Attempts in WordPress.

White Screen of Death

Are you seeing a white screen on your WordPress admin? This issue is often referred to as the WordPress white screen of death.

This happens when you exhaust the memory limit. It could be caused by a poorly coded plugin or theme, or by unreliable web hosting.

If you are seeing this error, then please refer to our guide on how to fix the WordPress white screen of death.

Incorrect Password Issue

There’s nothing more frustrating than being told you’ve used the wrong password when you’re sure you haven’t, and you even checked that your caps lock isn’t on.

This can happen if you were a victim of a hack, or you might just be making an honest mistake.

Worse still, when you try to change your password, you never receive the email because it goes to an address you no longer have access to.

Luckily, there’s another way, and you can reset your WordPress password from phpMyAdmin. This method can be a bit overwhelming for new users, but it’s your best hope for regaining access to your admin area.

Problems with Plugins

You may be locked out of your WordPress site due to a faulty plugin or theme. This may be the case if you can’t log in to WordPress admin after installing a new plugin, or if the error message mentions ‘wp-content/plugins/’.

To regain access to your site you’ll have to temporarily disable your plugins. You can do that using FTP or phpMyAdmin by following our step by step guide on how to deactivate all plugins when not able to access wp-admin.

Lost Admin Privileges

Sometimes, you may be able to login to your WordPress admin, but you don’t see any of the admin functionality. For example, you don’t have access to your themes or plugins.

This can happen if your user permissions were modified. It could be that hackers have infected your site and then deleted your admin privileges.

In this case, you should add an admin user to the WordPress database via MySQL (phpMyAdmin).

Hacked WordPress Site

If you do suspect that your site has been hacked, then there are other steps you may need to take.

A hacked website may look different, display different content, or automatically play music or other media. Worse still, it may be infecting your visitors with viruses, so you need to act quickly.

Start with our beginner’s guide on how to fix your hacked WordPress site. We’ll show you how to identify the hack, restore your site from a backup, and remove any malware.

After that, you should protect your site from future attacks. We show you how to do that in our ultimate WordPress security guide .

Login Page Refreshing and Redirecting

Another type of login error is when your WordPress login page keeps refreshing and redirecting it back to the login screen.

This can happen because of incorrect values for the site URL and home URL fields in the WordPress options table. It can also be caused by poorly configured permalink settings or redirects setup in the .htaccess file.

To fix this problem, check our guide on how to fix WordPress Login Page refreshing and redirecting issue.

‘This Has Been Disabled’ Error

When you try to log into your WordPress admin area, do you see the error ‘This has been disabled’? This message is displayed when you have gone to the wrong admin address.

A common WordPress security practice is to change the default admin login URL (domain.com/wp-admin) to something custom. This can help prevent hackers and bots from hammering your login URL trying to gain access.

If you forget that the URL has been changed and go to the old one, then you’ll see this error message. If you’ve forgotten the correct address, then you should check our beginner’s guide on how to find your WordPress Login URL.

‘Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance’ Error

Are you seeing the ‘Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance’ error in WordPress? This error usually appears while updating WordPress core, plugins, or themes.

But if your WordPress site fails to finish the update, then you are left stuck in maintenance mode.

To fix the problem, you should check our guide on how to fix the Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance error in WordPress. The guide will also explain why the error happens and how to avoid it in the future.

PHP Syntax Errors

PHP errors can happen after you paste a code snippet from a WordPress tutorial or website. The wrong code can stop your website from working properly so that you can’t log in.

Often beginners use the built-in WordPress editor from their dashboard. That feature is handy, but can lead to disaster if you don’t know what you are doing.

That’s why we wrote our beginner’s guide to pasting snippets from the web into WordPress.

If you’re locked out of your WordPress admin because of a code snippet, then you’ll have to fix the problem manually using an FTP program to access your files. If you’re not familiar with FTP, then check our beginner’s guide on FTP.

After you connect to your WordPress site using the FTP software, you should follow our guide on how to fix syntax errors in WordPress to correct or remove the code that you added.

We hope this tutorial helped you log into your WordPress admin area. You may also want to learn how to choose the best WordPress hosting, or check out list of must have plugins to grow your website.

If you liked this guide, then please consider subscribing to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post What To Do When You Are Locked Out of WordPress Admin (wp-admin) appeared first on WPBeginner.

September 23, 2021 at 02:30PM

Welcome Easy Digital Downloads, WP Simple Pay, AffiliateWP, and More to the WPBeginner Family of Products

Today, I’m extremely excited to share that all Sandhills Development products are joining Awesome Motive, and they’re now part of the WPBeginner family of products.

This includes several popular WordPress plugins including Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, WP Simple Pay, Sugar Calendar, and many more.

These brands are very close to my heart because when I first started selling premium plugins in 2013, we used Easy Digital Downloads, and we still use EDD to power our eCommerce.

This is one of those rare life moments where things have come full circle, and I honestly feel like I’m living in a dream.

Introduction – Quick Overview of the Plugins

Unlike our other investments, this is an acquisition of a large portfolio of plugins, so I’ll give a quick overview of what each of them do.

Easy Digital Downloads makes it easy for you to sell digital products online such as eBooks, digital art, premium software, and just about any type of digital files.

We use EDD to manage and sell our popular premium plugins because it makes it easy for us to collect recurring subscription payments on our website, manage software licensing, protect premium file access (so only members can access it), and more.

AffiliateWP is the leading affiliate management software for WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, and other popular WordPress platforms. Simply put, it makes it easy for you to launch an affiliate program for your online store.

WP Simple Pay is a Stripe payment plugin that makes it easy for you to accept one-time or recurring payments on your website without setting up a shopping cart. It comes with a payment form builder and all the tools for you to securely accept payments on your site.

Sugar Calendar is a simple events calendar plugin for WordPress. It makes it easy to do event management, ticketing, and everything you need to manage / run an event. It also seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce, Stripe, and other solutions so you can sell event tickets and accept payments on your site.

Aside from that, as part of this deal, we’re also acquiring several free open source plugins such as the popular Transients Manager plugin that’s very helpful in debugging WordPress errors.

Background Story

In 2013, when I launched OptinMonster, I needed a solution that made it easy for me to sell the premium plugin (digital download), restrict access & updates to only paying members, and most importantly accept recurring payments.

We ended up using Easy Digital Downloads because it helped us do all of that and more.

As we built more premium plugins like MonsterInsights, WPForms, etc they all used EDD.

Even the popular WordPress plugins we later acquired / invested in through the WPBeginner Growth Fund like Smash Balloon, SearchWP, Uncanny Automator, Formidable Forms, etc all used Easy Digital Downloads.

I can easily say that after WordPress, Easy Digital Downloads has a single largest impact on my online success.

This is why it has always had a special place in my heart.

Over the years, I became good friends with EDD / Sandhills Development founder, Pippin Williamson.

We first talked about joining forces back in 2015, but the timing wasn’t right.

After our acquisition of SearchWP in July, Pippin reached out, and we restarted the conversation.

After a few calls, we agreed that Awesome Motive will be the perfect home for Easy Digital Downloads and other Sandhills products given our vast experience in the WordPress industry.

I’m truly honored to have this opportunity to serve over 100,000+ users who use Sandhills Products to grow their online business.

What’s Coming Next?

Our work is just starting.

We will be leveraging the scale and knowledge of the Awesome Motive team to build more innovative solutions to help you grow your online business.

We have built a lot of internal tools to grow our eCommerce / digital product business that I’m really looking forward to sharing with the WordPress community.

We will be combining my vision + the vast knowledge of the Sandhills team to bring even more powerful features to you.

If you have suggestions on features you’d like to see in EDD, AffiliateWP, WP Simple Pay, or any of Sandhills plugin, then please let us know by sending us a message via WPBeginner contact form.

As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner. We look forward to bringing you more amazing solutions to help you grow your business.

Yours Truly,

Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

P.S. Want to join our team and work alongside me in helping small businesses grow and compete with the big guys? We’re hiring.

We’re a fully remote team of over 200+ amazingly talented team members across 36 countries.

The post Welcome Easy Digital Downloads, WP Simple Pay, AffiliateWP, and More to the WPBeginner Family of Products appeared first on WPBeginner.

September 22, 2021 at 06:40PM

How to Set Up Business Call Forwarding From Your Website

Do you want to set up business call forwarding from your website?

For many small businesses, calls from potential customers generate significant sales and revenue. This is why it’s important to properly set up business call forwarding from your website.

In this article, we will share a step by step guide on how to easily set up business call forwarding from your WordPress site.

What Do You Need to Set Up Business Call Forwarding from Your Website?

Normally, you can just add a phone number to your WordPress website or online store. Your website visitors can use the phone number to make a call.

However, regular phone services don’t come with advanced features like call forwarding, business hours, call waiting, etc. Plus, they cost a lot more even for even basic features like basic call forwarding.

For proper business call forwarding, you’ll need a smart business phone service provider.

We recommend using Nextiva. It is the best business phone service on the market and allows you to easily manage your business calls at much lower costs than landline or mobile phone services.

Note: We use Nextiva at WPBeginner for our business phone number.

Nextiva provides VoIP phone service, which means instead of landlines it uses the internet to make and receive phone calls.

Using VoIP allows you to reduce costs and take advantage of advanced features like call forwarding, call recordings, voicemail, call waiting, and more. Plus, you can choose a number in any location or get a toll-free number.

More importantly, you can manage calls on your existing mobile phone, computers, or even a desk phone too.

You can even share one number with multiple team member which is great for remote teams like ours.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to set up business call forwarding from your website.

Setting Up Business Call Forwarding

First, you need to sign up for a Nextiva account. During sign up, you’ll be allowed to choose a business phone number, and you can also connect your existing phone number as well.

Once you have set up your account, you can make and receive calls from your business phone number on whatever device you choose.

After that, you can set up call forwarding for your website.

Simply head over to Users » Actions » Voice Settings page and select Forwarding from the left menu.

From here, you can enter any phone number under the ‘Call forward (selective)’ section.

Below that, you can choose when to forward a call by clicking on the Forwarding Conditions. You can add conditions based on schedule, by phone number, and more.

Apart from selective call forwarding, you can also set up always-on call forwarding, busy call forwarding, or forward calls when unanswered.

Once you have set up call forwarding, don’t forget to test it out before adding it to your website.

Adding a Click to Call Option in WordPress

Now that you have enabled business call forwarding, you may want to add click to call buttons to your website.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Call Button plugin on your site. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » WP Call Button page to configure plugin settings.

The plugin comes with a sticky button that floats on-screen across your website. You can hide or show it on certain posts or pages. You can also choose to show it only on mobile devices.

If you would like to display the button manually, then you can switch to the Static Call Button tab. From here, you can choose button settings and copy a shortcode.

Once you are finished with settings, you can also add a sticky call button in your posts and pages using a block or a widget.

In the block settings, you can choose colors, text size, alignment, and show or hide the phone icon.

Once you are finished, you can save your changes and visit your website to see your call now button in action.

For more ways to add a clickable phone number in WordPress, see our tutorial on how to add a click to call button in WordPress.

Your users can now click to call your phone number and their calls will be forwarded based on your call forwarding settings.

We always recommend website owners to provide more than one way for customers to contact your business. Along with phone, it’s a good idea to have a contact form and if possible offer a live chat or chatbot solution on your site.

We hope this article helped you learn how to set up business call forwarding from your website. You may also want to see our see our guide on how to track button clicks in WordPress, and our expert comparison of the best email marketing services.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Set Up Business Call Forwarding From Your Website appeared first on WPBeginner.

September 21, 2021 at 03:30PM