Cannot Log Into WordPress

Every once in a while when I open up my email, I will get a question from someone who is going through a training that I recorded. It is always a good feeling to see that people are using my training materials and enhancing their WordPress skills. In addition, it give me the opportunity to discover what areas I need to refine and provided better explanations.

This was the case today; I received the following question this morning. I provided an answer which was well received! My explanation provided the solution to the issue at hand.

Here is the question as it was asked:

[box]Yesterday, after watching one of your videos on I installed the a security plugin and I made some changes to make my site more secure with it. The next day I could not login anymore, probably because of changing the wp-login. Now I do have the following questions:
– how to deactivate this or if necessary all plugins now I can’t reach my dashboard anymore?
– where to go into my Control Panel to make the necessary changes?
– what are the changes I have to make and how to restore it so that I can login again?

Please help me out to solve this problem, so that I can work on my website as before?
[/box] This is a great question! When you install security plugins a lot of things can go ‘wrong.’ While it will lock out the ‘bad guys,’ it can also lock YOU out if you are unaware of what is happening.

I had a very simple answer which I will share (this is not my ACTUAL answer – for this blog post I am actually elaborating a bit to help with the explanations)

Sorry you experienced some difficulties! Which plugin & author are you using?

Here is what you can do –

1. Try going to your http://YourDomainName.com/login – see if that works. Some security plugins will mask the actual login page to something else. Normally when you go to log into your dashboard, you go to http://YourDomainName.com/wp-admin – this will automatically redirect you to http://YourDomainName.com/wp-login.php. Several security plugins will redirect the wp-login.php page to just be login.

2. If that does not work, you can log into your cPanel and go into your File Manager – Navigate to public-http / wp-content / plugins – once there, you can rename the folder that has the security plugin. When you rename the folder, it will automatically deactivate the plugin. This is true for ANY plugin, not just a security plugin. There have been times when I had to go into a clients site via the cPanel and deactivate all the plugins because some plugin was causing a conflict. Once they were all deactivated, I was able to get into the site. At that point, i would reactivate each plugin one by one to discover what the offending plugin was.

That should do the trick!

Let me know how things turn out.