Can’t login to WordPress after upgrading

Posted by Sebastien | Filed under Internet

Today I upgraded my personal franchise blog from WordPress 2.1 to WordPress 2.6.2. I know, what a big upgrade… To do so, I simply went to my webhost admin panel and used their one-click upgrade service. Within 2 minutes I received an email from my host telling me that everything went fine.

So I tried to go back to my blog admin panel but it would not let me in. Every time I entered my login and password, it would just go back to the login page. I tried typing wrong password and it would give me an errror message. Going back to the homepage of the blog, I realized it was showing me as logged in. Strange.

That’s when I decided to use my secret troubleshooting weapon…. Google (I know, it’s no secret weapon). I googled “can’t login to wordpress after upgrade” and I the first result thta popped up was a page on WordPress forum.

This is the solution I used:

I had this problem after I updated my WP. Tried everything… cleaning out the cash, the cookies, changing the admin password, making changes in the wp-login.php, making changes to wp-config.php.

The last thing I tried was to clean out all of my plugins, deleting them from my ftp (after downloading everything to my computer!) and then when I tried to login I got a message that my database neded uppdating because it didn’t “fit” to my wordpress installation. An now… I can login!

But this also seems like a good fix:

I’m having this problem when upgrading to 2.6.2 with Fantastico. Here’s the process that’s been consistently working for me to correct it:

  1. Using FTP, rename the plugins folder (at /wp-content/plugins/) to plugins-old
  2. Log in as usual
  3. I am prompted to upgrade the database, so I click that button and it does
  4. Rename plugins-old back to plugins
  5. Log in again

Once I do that, everything seems to work.

If you’re having any login issue after updating WordPress, you may want to try any of the fixes.

See also:

How To Upgrade WordPress Without Losing Your Plugins
How To Improve The Search Feature Of Your WordPress Blog
Working on our new franchise blog

  Share   |   Bookmark   | October 14th, 2008

10 Responses to “Can’t login to WordPress after upgrading”

  1. seosurvivor Says:
    October 14th, 2008 at 1:37 pm

    I went through that recently man.. It sucks! See if this helps: http://www.seosurvivor.com/change-is-good-but-it-can-cause-panic/

  2. Sebastien Says:
    October 15th, 2008 at 12:37 pm

    Hi Ricardo,

    Thanks for your comment but I figured it out and added the fix to this post.

    Sebastien

  3. Nick Garner Says:
    November 9th, 2008 at 7:22 am

    Just to say - ive renamed my plugins folder and went through the database upgrade and then renamed the folder back to plugins - and it all worked fine. Annoying and disconcerting problem.

  4. Sebastien Says:
    November 9th, 2008 at 9:03 am

    @Nick - yes, that’s what I should have done. I’ll know for next time…

  5. Eric Richardson Says:
    November 16th, 2008 at 4:09 am

    I just don’t update when a new version comes out, too much hassle.

  6. Brendan Burns Says:
    November 27th, 2008 at 10:35 am

    Best Post Ever!!!!!
    Thank you!

  7. MediaWorksStudio » Blog Archive » Documentation: WP Can’t login after big Upgrade (2.1 to 2.6) Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    [...] http://www.sebastienpage.com/2008/10/14/cant-login-to-wordpress-after-upgrading/ [...]

  8. Rebeccas.se Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 1:41 pm

    Thank you, you´re a lifesaver!

  9. Mike Chandler Says:
    December 4th, 2008 at 2:32 pm

    Hey, same thing here, same upgrade as well. Thanks for the fix. Bless you and bless Google for finding you.

  10. How To Upgrade WordPress Without Losing Your Plugins Says:
    December 10th, 2008 at 10:57 pm

    [...] you’ve updated to a previous version before, you may have encountered issues such as not being able to login for example. As I was able to verify before, the most common problem comes from the [...]

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