It happens to the best of us: You forgot the password or login name to your WordPress website.
I get it, we all have way to much to remember anyway and thanks to password recovery, this is usually no big deal.
However, it becomes critical when, for some reason, the recovery email does not work.
What then? Start the website from scratch? Pay some hackers to get back in? Fortunately, it’s much less complicated than that.
Solution
In case you can’t get into the WordPress backend anymore, you can reset your password inside the database via PhpMyAdmin.
To do so, access the database that belongs to your site and find the wp_users table (note that it might have a different prefix than wp_ if you changed it during the installation).
Find your username in the user_login column and click on edit on the left side (might also be a pencil icon).
In the next screen, you will see a field called user_pass with lots of weird characters in it.
Delete whatever is in there and write your new password. Then, use the drop-down menu in the function column and set it to MD5.
That way, when you save at the bottom, the new password will be encrypted.
You should now be able to get back into your site.