Often times during troubleshooting, many sites will recommend deactivate all plugins and activate them one by one. What’s worst is sometimes you get locked out of your WordPress admin panel, so you can’t even deactivate the plugins in an easy way. If you have ever faced the white screen of death, then you know exactly what we are talking about. In this article, we will show you how to deactivate all WordPress plugins when not able to access wp-admin area.
There are two methods to disabling your plugins. One requires you to use FTP, and the other requires you to use phpMyAdmin.
Deactivate All Plugins Using FTP
In this method, you will need to either use FTP, or your host’s file manager. Navigate to the /wp-content/ folder. You will see a folder called plugins. Rename the plugins folder to anything that you like. In our example, we will call it “plugins.deactivate”. Once you do this, all of your plugins will be deactivated.
Most of the time when you do this, you are usually locked out of your admin panel. If the issue was with your plugins, you should be able login to your /wp-admin/. Once you do that, go back to your /wp-content/ directory and rename “plugins.deactivate” back to plugins. Now you can activate one plugin at a time until your site breaks again. At which point, you will know exactly which plugin caused the issue.
Deactivate all plugins using phpMyAdmin
The FTP method is definitely easier in our opinion, however you can also deactivate all plugins using phpMyAdmin. If you don’t know how to get to phpMyAdmin, then we recommend using the FTP method above.
In your WordPress database, go in the wp_options table. Locate the option name “active_plugins”. Now edit the value of that option and change it to this: a:0:{}
We hope that this article helps you deactivate all plugins in a fairly easy way.