How to deactivate wordpress plugins manually using FTP and phpMyAdmin

Posted in Wordpress By Sureyea

You can customize and add extra features to your wordpress site by using plugins. Each and every wordpress plugins are tested before it gets available in wordpress community. If even though it is tested some plugins end up in bugs and some plugins even get conflicted with other plugins. That’s why developers update plugins and we suggest you not to use plugins that are no longer maintained and supported.

At times you may experience trouble with such plugins and that might crash your entire website. In such cases you should try deactivating all your plugins and activate each plugins separately. There are even times where you can’t access your admin area or you might experience blank white screen. This is where you are losing your only chance to disable plugins from your dashboard. Here we will see how to deactivate wordpress plugins in other possible ways.

There are two ways to disable wordpress plugins.

Deactivating plugins using FTP or file manager
Deactivating plugin from database using phpMyAdmin

How to deactivate wordpress plugins using FTP

In order to deactivate your plugins you have to access your wordpress files. You can access wordpress files using FTP or you can access using file manager (cPanel). If you are not familiar with FTP then here is how to setup FileZilla FTP client. The next step is to locate your wordpress files where you see folders like wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes. Now go to wp-content folder and you will see plugins directory, just rename the / plugins / to disabled, deactivated or anything you like. Login to your wordpress dashboard and then navigate to plugins where you will see no plugins. Now again rename the folder to / plugins /and check back plugins page in your dashboard. All plugins are visible and deactivated.

You can even disable particular plugin by renaming the plugin folder in case if you found out the plugin that is exactly causing trouble.

Deactivating plugins via FTP is the easiest way; anyhow know the following method too.

How to deactivate wordpress plugins from Database using phpMyAdmin

Login to your cPanel or site’s control panel (whatever panel your hosting is providing) and open phpMyAdmin in database area. Backup your Database before you try this method. Now find and open your Database that your site uses.

Now open wp_options in your database table and locate active_plugins.

Run the following SQL query in phpMyAdmin in case if you can’t find the active_plugins.

SELECT *FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;

Edit active_plugins after spotting it and now in option_value you will see similar lines.

{ i:3;s:36:"contact-form-7/wp-contact-form-7.php";
i:13;s:39:"syntaxhighlighter/syntaxhighlighter.php"; }

The above line depends on the type of plugins and number of plugins that you are using in your site. To disable all plugins just empty the option_value field and click on go.